


A Desert Flower Blooms

by BooksAreMyChoiceWeapon



Category: RimWorld (Video Game)
Genre: Found Family, Gen, Guns, Injury, Medicine, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Reference to Organ Harvesting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-26
Updated: 2021-01-20
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:34:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 32,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21567715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BooksAreMyChoiceWeapon/pseuds/BooksAreMyChoiceWeapon
Summary: A girl from an enemy faction crash lands near a tiny farming colony. She's rescued and taken in, but can she find a family on a planet that seems bent on destroying everything she holds dear?I'm basing this super loosely on one of my playthroughs, and by "super loosely" I mean mostly just ideas for characters and basic plot events. I don't have a whole lot of time to work on this due to my school schedule, but I do have plans for this work - it just might be a long time before those plans go into effect.A big thank you to my friends (y'all know who you are) for reading over my chapters and giving me helpful feedback! :)A note: Since the decision to mark for graphic violence is up to me, I marked it just to make sure not to upset anyone. I'm fairly squeamish myself, so I won't be describing any injuries in detail.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 21





	1. The Girl That Fell From the Sky

The young girl came to slowly, waves of pain washing over her body and searing her nerves. As she wrenched open her eyes, the landscape around her appeared as a swirling mass of brown and green. Twisted bits of molten metal lay all around and under her broken body, like bits of some mechanical egg.

Gritting her teeth and trying hard not to cry, she tried in vain to pull herself into a sitting position, but ended up collapsing back into the metal fragments that had made up her transport pod. 

She cried aloud in pain, startling some of the small hares that had started to investigate her crash site. This isn’t good, Skye, the girl thought to herself, looking around frantically for any signs of human life. 

“Hello? Hello?? Help!!! Help me!!!!” she shouted to the wind, hands slipping in her own blood as she frantically searched the wreckage by her sides. The pounding in her skull seemed to grow louder and louder as she sifted through the dust and metal, her sanity seeming to drip away as the minutes passed.

There. She caught a glimpse of it at the edge of her vision. The distress beacon. Skye struggled towards it, fog creeping into her vision as she slowly bled out through countless wounds. Her fingertips grazed the orange lever, and Skye summoned the last of her strength to flip it to “on.” She collapsed in relief to the sound of tree branches rustling above her.

\---

Fox sat at the rough-hewn wooden table, polishing her pistol and occasionally changing the channel on the dented old radio. Most channels hosted nothing but a nondescript fuzz, but occasionally she would come across something, usually one of the old radio dramas broadcast by that quirky artist down in Tedeslar. 

After some fumbling, she finally did find it. It was an episode she’d heard before, but it was better than static.

By about halfway through the episode, Fox had moved on from her weapon and had begun to polish Sab’s rifle. The outlaws whooped and hollered over the radio as they fired up their stolen ship. At this point in the episode, Fox always wondered whether it was actually possible to escape the planet. People were always arriving, crashing down from across the galaxy, but nobody ever seemed to leave. 

The whirring of the ship faded in and out of static, and eventually cut out. “Stupid piece of crap,” Fox muttered to herself, knocking the radio with her knuckles, the only part of her hand that was clean at the moment. The radio refused to cooperate, however, prompting Fox to wipe her hand off and turn the dial to another frequency.

“--pod crashed at 47.3285 degrees west, 41.7639 degrees north. One passenger, incapacitated, affiliated with the Republican Council of Dabanarium. Requesting immediate assistance from anyone in the--”

Fox paused, slightly shocked, as the automated female voice read out the message again. Dabnarium was an enemy, and a powerful one at that. In fact, they had sent a raid just two days ago, one that had deprived the colony of a watermill and that had almost deprived Sab of an arm. 

But still...

\---

'It’s a good thing I have them sedated,' Anna thought to herself as she bandaged up the last prisoner. She had no idea what the colony was supposed to do with all these prisoners once they woke up. Enemy raiders were rowdy and unpredictable, even without weapons, and the colony most definitely didn’t have room to house any more. They were currently being kept in Fox’s bedroom, much to Fox’s dismay. Two of the raiders were sleeping on the floor, in puddles of their own blood that Anna had yet to clean, and another one was passed out on the rickety wooden bed, his broken leg lifted up off the mattress by a sling made of Sab’s old coat.

The sun was just beginning to set as Anna sat by the river, desperately trying to get the dried blood out from under her broken fingernails. Looking up and across the river, she caught a glimpse of Fox’s black hair and mocha-colored features.

“Fox?!?” 

“Anna!! Help!! She needs help!!”

Looking closer, Anna caught a glimpse of something Fox was carrying in her arms. Something small…

“Anna, please! Get your meds! Now!!”

The fear in Fox’s voice was contagious. Anna dashed back inside and into the storeroom and began to fumble around for her herbs in the dark. When she emerged, bundles of leaves and bandages in her fists, Fox was kicking down the door to her former bedroom, a child in her arms.

“No, Fox, wait!” Anna followed Fox inside, making sure to lock the door behind her as Fox laid the child on a clean spot on the floor..

“What’d you bring her in here for? With all the-”

“Just patch her up, okay! She’s… she’s not waking up…”

Anna silently agreed, resolving to ask the questions later. The girl lying on the floor was thin, with scraggly brownish-black hair and dark skin. Anna began to stop the bleeding from the many puncture and scrape wounds that littered her body. After a few silent minutes, the child began to cough and groan, before falling back asleep once more. At least the lungs are working, Anna noted to herself.

“She’s Dabnarian, by the way. I’m sorry I forgot to mention that,” Fox piped up from the corner, nervously twirling her pistol around her index finger. “I wasn’t sure if she was hostile or not, so…”

“You’re fine,” Anna replied, wrapping the young girl’s arm in gauze. “Though, eventually, we’re gonna have to move her out of here, what with all the men…”

“They’re Dabnarian too, right?”

“Yeah, but faction ties don’t mean the same thing everywhere, Fox. You should know that.”

“Yeah, you’re right.”

Anna paused, briefly calculating the amount of herbs she needed to fight infection. “Ya know, she looks kinda like you.”

“She does?”

“Yeah, she does. You don’t have a sister you didn’t tell us about?”

“Pretty sure I don’t.”

“Pretty sure?”

“You know how this world works, Anna. You can never be sure of anything.” Fox looked down at her feet. “Ya know, I’m gonna go check out the weapons we got off this last raid. I’ll see ya later.”

“Alright.” 

Anna kept working, wiping the dirt and grime off the child’s face and arms. With luck, the girl would get better, and then… 

Anna stopped. What would they do with the child? They could send her back home, but her home was Dabnarium. Maybe, maybe she wanted to go back? The issue swirled its way through Anna’s mind until she eventually decided to give it a rest. They’d cross that bridge when they came to it.


	2. Prisoners

Skye awoke on the grimy floor, head swimming. She pushed herself up, looking in bewilderment at the bandages on her arms and legs. She reached for the back of her neck - her hair was pulled into a low ponytail and tied with a scrap of loose fabric.

“Oh look boys, she’s awake,” a rough voice grumbled from the corner. Skye turned in the torchlight to see a middle-aged man, in bandages like herself, crouched against the opposite wall of the cramped room. 

“So, what’s your story, miss?” The man crept closer. “Where you from? You don’t look familiar.” 

Skye shuffled backwards slightly. “You first,” she muttered after a moment of hesitation.

“Oh us? We’re Dabnarian, don’t ya know?” He motioned to the other two men in the room. “We tried to raid this colony here, yeah? Turns out these greenies aren’t the wimps we thought they were.”

“Wait, you’re Dabnarian? Do you know-”

“Hey, listen, we aren’t going on some wild goose chase for your lost auntie or whatever. Got our own crap to deal with.” The man leaned back up against the wall. “I mean, we are in prison after all.”

“What?” Skye looked around. They were in a small, grimy room with one bed, one table, and a torch. There was one man in the bed, with the rest of the prisoners sitting or lying on the dusty floor. The man on the floor who hadn’t spoken up yet appeared to be smeared in his own blood.

Skye began to panic. In prison? How did she get here? And why? And when? What day was it? Where even was she?

The girl got up, restless, and turned towards the door. This was a mistake. She wasn’t supposed to be in prison. She began to bang on the door with her calloused fists. “Hey! Hey! Let me out! I’m not supposed to be here!”

The gruff man leaning against the wall began laughing. “You really think they’ll let you out just cause you’re yelling like that? Oh, that’s rich!” He wiped his eyes. “You really don’t know how this works, do you?”

Skye pulled her fists away from the door, not daring to face the man.

“Every colony here on the rim is the same. We’re here because they want something.”

“Well… what do they want from us, then?”

The man let out a dispirited laugh. “Our organs, probably. I’m betting on my kidney - I’ve just about ruined my liver, after all.”

Skye’s heart thumped in her chest. “We’re gonna die,” she whispered, too scared to admit it. 

“Might as well get used to it, kid.” The man laid down, hands behind his head.

Skye sat down in front of the door. Twelve years. Was that really all she was gonna get?

\---

Fox awoke in the dark in her makeshift bed on the floor of Anna’s room. Shouts echoed through the early-morning haze from the other side of the door. Fox sighed, and reluctantly got up from the bundle of animal skins on the floor. As she pulled on her jacket and started to walk out, Anna sat up in her bed.

“You going to check on the prisoners?”

“They’re keeping me awake.”

“Oh, let me go with you. I haven’t been able to sleep thanks to them.”

The two women shuffled down the hallway to Fox’s former bedroom as the shouts grew louder. Anna shook her head. “You think they got into another fight again?”

Fox sighed. “They better not have.” She opened the door to see the little girl shouting and crying at the top of her lungs as the other prisoners covered their ears, or shouted back.

“They’re gonna kill us all! There’s no hope for us! We have to escape - it’s the only way to save our lives!” the girl cried as she pounded on the wall with her fists.

“Hey!” Fox shouted, exasperated, and the little girl turned to her, fear and anger in her eyes. Eyeing the door, she shoved Fox aside and dashed into the hallway, right into the arms of Anna. 

Anna looked down at the squirming girl in her arms. “You’re not going anywhere.”

Fox and Anna managed to drag the screaming girl to Anna’s room and sit her down on the bed. Anna continued to hold onto her as she squirmed and writhed.

Fox knelt down to look the girl in the eyes. “Hey, listen, we’re not going to kill you, okay? So if you could please stop screaming for the rest of tonight, we’d really appreciate it, alright?”

The girl quieted down, sniffling and wiping at her face. Anna lightly stroked the girls hair. “We’re so sorry for putting you in there with those men. You’re going to stay here now, while we figure out… how to take care of you.”

“You’re not going to take my organs out?” the little girl croaked.

“No, of course not, sweetie!” Anna responded soothingly.

Fox stood up, crossing her arms. “Who told you that? Stupid raider trash…” Fox sighed. “Listen, if you could stay in this room tonight, without screaming, then that’d be great. I promise we won’t hurt you, but you have to let us sleep, alright?”

The girl nodded, and Anna got up. Walking out the door, she turned to Fox. “I’m gonna go sleep on the floor in the storage room, kay?”

“That’s fine,” Fox responded, and got up to follow Anna. As she reached the door, she turned around. “Good night, little…”

“Skye. I’m… I’m Skye.”

“Well, alright then. Good night, Skye. I’m locking the door, so don’t try to escape again, okay?”

“...Okay.” Skye sat in silence as the door closed shut.


	3. Change of Allegiance

“Well, alright then, I’ll be back, sweetie. Think it over!” Anna chirped, walking out the door and closing it shut.

It had been four days, four days alone in what Skye assumed to be someone’s old bedroom. Well, not exactly alone. The three members of the colony (at least, she assumed there were only three, as she only saw three and they never spoke of anyone else) had all been visiting her, with various intents. Sab, a man about the same age as the others with dark tan skin and muscular arms, came in the morning and evening to deliver food, and nothing more. Anna, a pale brunette that seemed to be the doctor in the colony came each day around noon to convince Skye to join the colony. And Fox, lean and dark-skinned, came occasionally with seemingly no purpose for her visit at all.

‘Sab really gets on my nerves, you know,’ she complained once, without any warning. ‘He grew up as a farmer, and yet he refuses to help out with the planting. I mean, at least he helps haul in the harvest, but still…’ Skye hadn’t known how to respond to this, so she simply said nothing.

Another day, Fox came in towards the evening with the chessboard under one arm. ‘Anna won’t play with me today, and Sab is already asleep, so I guess I’ll teach you…’ That time too, Skye had said nothing. 

Today, Fox came in with a small piece of wood and a knife, a few minutes after Anna left. She didn’t say anything, didn’t provide an explanation or an excuse for her being there, just sat in the corner and slowly carved away at the wood. Skye, being tired from the day’s recruitment talk, didn’t have the energy to figure out Fox’s intentions.

So the two sat in silence for a while, Fox chipping at the wood, Skye blankly staring at the floor, focusing on the nearly-imperceptible sound of shavings hitting the stone. She wondered whether or not Fox was going to sweep them up before she left. 

“I’m gonna level with you, I’m here because Anna told me to.” 

Skye looked up. Fox wasn’t looking at her, but rather at the wood carving, thought the knife had stopped moving for the present.

“She’s gotten the feeling that she hasn’t been getting anywhere with you. With your recruitment, I mean. She thought maybe I’d have better luck with you.”

Fox picked up one of the shavings off of the floor, and bent the little curl of wood until it snapped and flattened between her fingertips.

“I mean, I don’t feel like I’ve been having much luck with you either. I’ve been trying my best to be open and honest with you, and I guess we’re kinda at the end of our ropes, ya know? Kinda, running out of hope for this endeavor, I guess.”

Fox picked up another shaving, gently applying pressure to the delicate curve and watching it bounce back to its original curvature.

“I’m just really wondering, why won’t you talk now? You screamed so loud that first night, and then you told me your name, and now you won’t say anything at all.”

Skye looked down at the floor again. 

“You don’t have to answer my questions, if you don’t want to. I guess, if I were you, I wouldn’t be willing to be interrogated either.” Fox dropped the wood shaving, and began whittling at the piece again, slower than before. “Do you… do you have any questions? I know I would… A lot, actually.”

Skye hesitated. She did have a lot of questions, but now that she was offered the chance… they all seemed to flit away. Well, all but one, anyways.

“What…” Skye hesitated, the roughness of her own voice catching her off guard. “What did you do with the other Dabnarian prisoners?”

“We let them go home.”

“Do they… are they healthy?”

“Mostly. One of them lost a leg due to infection, so he has a peg leg now. Better than letting the poor sucker die, I guess.”

“They… have all their organs?”

Fox laughed. “Oh yeah, they have their organs. We don’t do that here, ya know. I thought I told you that earlier.”

“Oh.” Skye, slightly embarrassed, fell silent again.

“Ya know, a good handful of the colonies on the rim don’t harvest organs,” Fox said after a few quiet moments. “It’s just that there are a lot that do…”

“Why do you want to recruit me, anyway?” Skye looked directly at Fox, her gaze serious.

“Well, you’re a kid, Skye. All three of us agreed that it would be irresponsible of us to send you back to one of the Dabna-”

“But that’s my home!”

“Well, honestly, by the looks of it, they didn’t feed you too well. No offense. Plus, they run raids regularly. If you went back to live with them, you’d probably end up like one of those men we sent home - raiding like crazy until someone shoots you down.”

Skye paused. She’d never really thought about her faction that way. Back home, all the kids were skinny. She thought it was just how things were.

“How about this,” Fox said, “How about trying us out? Be a member of our settlement for as long as you want. We’ll feed you, clothe you, and keep you safe for as long as you want to live here, and if you really want to go home after a few weeks or so, you can leave.”

After a few moments of silence, Fox got up and turned towards the door. “Here, I’m gonna leave this door unlocked, okay? Join us, leave us… whatever you want. Think it over.”

And with that, Fox left, and Skye sat in silence once more.

\---

“What’s for dinner, Anna?” Sab asked, sitting down at the rough-hewn table next to Fox, who was polishing her pistol with her feet up on the table.

“It’s fried rice again, but I flavored it with some herbs I found outside,” Anna replied, carrying the meals over to the table.

“What herbs?” Fox asked nonchalantly, not bothering to look up from her gun.

“Wild rosemary and get-your-muddy-feet-off-the-table root,” Anna replied, throwing a smirk in Fox’s direction. 

Fox quietly pulled her feet off the table and put her gun down on the floor.

“So… how did it go with Skye after I left?” Anna asked, placing the meals on the table and sitting down. Fox noticed an extra meal sitting on the stovetop, but chose not to comment.

“Well, I mean, I guess…” Fox searched for words, noticing a little fuzzy mop of hair poking out from behind the wall of the kitchen. She smiled. “Hey there, little Skye.”

Anna turned, and a near-silent gasp fled her lips. Sab looked up from his rice, surprise on his face.

“Oh, hello there…” Anna began to rush around, grabbing the extra portion of rice from the stovetop and frantically motioning to Sab to drag in a stool from the workroom.

After the extra spot at the table was set, Anna took in a breath, turning towards the girl in the doorway. “Please, come sit down… Skye,” she said nervously, motioning to the stool.

Skye slowly walked in, tentatively setting herself down on the stool. The girl looked down at the table for a moment. 

“Welcome to our settlement, Skye,” Fox said, as Anna put her arm around the girl’s shoulder. Skye smiled slightly, and dug into her rice as the rest of the table began the meal.


	4. Cold Fear

A few days after her decision to join the settlement, Skye awoke to Fox gently prodding her arm.

“C’mon, little Skye, we’ve got a lot to do today,” Fox murmured, but Skye rolled towards the wall and pulled the muffalo-wool blanket over her head. 

“Hey, come on now, you can’t just sleep forever…” Fox tugged at the blanket, but Skye tugged back even harder, shifting her body even further away from Fox.

Fox sighed, shaking her head. “Alright, I tried being nice…” She grabbed the other end of the blanket and swiftly pulled the entire blanket off of the bed. 

“Hey!” Skye exclaimed, trying in vain to recapture the source of her warmth, but Fox held it up out of the way.

“You’re not going back to bed until tonight, understand? We really need your help right now to bring in the last of the harvest, alright? Now, get on your jacket and Anna can get you some breakfast…”

Skye groaned, begrudgingly rolling out of her bed and trudging to the kitchen. Anna set a plate of berries and a cold glass of muffalo milk in front of her before sitting down next to Fox, who began to dig into a plate of mashed potatoes left over from yesterday’s dinner.

“Eat up,” Anna motioned to Skye’s plate while pulling three large empty sacks from the storage room. She tossed one to Fox, who managed to catch the bag without looking up. “We’re in for a long day today, and I don’t think we have much time to spare…” Anna pulled on a ragged synthread parka and marched outside, her bag slung over her shoulder.

“She’s right,” Fox said around a bite of potatoes. She got up, knocking back a glass of water in one swig before turning around and motioning to Skye to finish. “C’mon, let’s shove it in your face and go!”

Skye pushed the rest of the berries into her cheeks like a chipmunk, and somehow managed to swallow the rest of her milk before grabbing the last bag and following Fox out the door.

\---

The cold wind blew eastward from the river and nipped at Skye’s exposed face and hands. She had spent the last few hours with Fox and Anna under the overcast sky, bent over at the waist, pulling up potato after dirt-encrusted potato. 

“Alright, everyone, let’s take a short break,” Anna called to the other two, and Skye collapsed into the potato leaves, her hands chapped and dirty. Her body protested as the cold seemed to seep into her skin through her parka. Skye, in order to ease her discomfort, tried to focus on the clouds above her. They looked partially swollen, like the half-filled sacks of potatoes and rice that the trio had recovered during the morning.

“Ya know, we should really be getting you some new clothes.” Fox appeared upside-down in Skye’s field of view, against the light grey sky. “You don’t look like you’re used to the cold.”

Skye shivered involuntarily, annoyed at seeming to prove Fox’s statement correct. 

“If all three of us can keep working at the same speed until dinner, we might be able to get two thirds of these fields harvested,” Anna remarked, walking up next to Fox while rubbing her hands together for warmth.

“I have to admit, I had no idea that it would get this cold this quickly.” Fox shoved her hands into her pockets, embarrassed. 

“Heh, I had no idea either,” Anna replied, looking out over the rows and rows of plants. “I guess all we can hope for is that this will be enough.”

‘But what if it isn’t?’ Skye wanted to ask, but she was worried about what the answer might be. She’d heard stories from the other kids in her own colony, unsavory tales about what happened to small colonies like this one when winters were too harsh.

Then again, they’d been kind enough to heal their prisoners. Maybe they had other ways to scrape by when things got desperate…

“Hey, sleepyhead, get up!” Fox prodded Skye with her foot. “We’ve got a lot more work to do today!”

Skye got up off the ground, wordlessly brushing dirt off her parka and pants. Uneasiness began to creep back into her mind as she watched the two women take their bags and head off to their assigned sections of cropland to harvest. Anna went off with a hurriedness that exuded urgency, and while Fox didn’t move quite as fast, she did have a determined set to her face that Skye hadn’t seen before. She wasn’t used to adults so obviously expressing their fears and concerns. Up till then, Skye hadn’t really thought of adults as having fears at all. The slow realization that they might have fears after all did nothing to comfort the young girl as she bent down once again to dig the hardened tubers from the ground.

\---

The next morning, Anna woke up shivering in her sleeping bag on the floor of Fox’s bedroom, Skye’s room not having been built yet. In the light of the torch lamp, she watched her breath crystallize in the air as she pulled on her parka. 

She tiptoed out of the bedroom and outside the base. The sun was nowhere to be seen, hidden behind a blanket of fat clouds and thick swirls of snow. She froze, dumbfounded for a minute, watching the fat flakes drift up against the outer wall, before rushing to the fields in an attempt to save the rest of the crops.

Anna pawed at the ground, past layers of fresh snow and freshly-dead potato leaves. It wasn’t possible, not this early. Her heart thudded to a stop when she pulled the shriveled tubers out of the soil.

It wasn’t possible...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Randy doesn't care that your potatoes had finished growing, they WILL DIE in the winter you weren't expecting...
> 
> For reference, this is loosely based off my second playthrough, where I didn't notice that I settled in a colder place than I did the first playthrough and thus didn't know how to accurately prepare for the coming winter.


	5. Blood on the Snow

The fat flakes twirled and floated gently to the ground as Skye looked out across the landscape in sheer amazement. Never before had she seen anything so pristine and perfect. Each and every tree branch was lined with a crisp layer of snow, and the ground looked like a perfect white blanket, like a soft, flat sheet of muffalo wool.

Skye leaned down to tentatively touch the snow, afraid to ruin it, when a blast of cold hit her from behind. She turned around in surprise, melting pieces of snow dripping down the back of her neck, to find Fox, laughing with her hands full of snow.

“Have you never seen snow before?” Fox asked. Skye shook her head.

“Oh boy, you’re in for a treat! Here, take a handful of snow, like this.” Fox scooped up some of the fluffy powder from the ground, and Skye hesitantly copied her.

“Good, now you pack it into a ball, like this.” Fox cupped her hands around the snow and patted the shrinking chunk several times until she had formed a solid ball. Skye tried her best to mold her snow into a uniform shape, but her stiff fingers didn’t help much in the endeavor.

“Now chuck it,” Fox instructed as she threw her snowball gently against Skye’s parka. It burst into a small cloud of powder and fell to the ground. Skye giggled quietly, and threw her ball at Fox’s torso. It mostly bounced off, but Fox still fell to the ground in mock defeat.

“Oh no! You got me!” She held her stomach in pretend agony. Skye laughed, and quickly formed another snowball and threw it at Fox’s head. 

“Hey!” Fox sat up, shaking snow out of her hair. She scooped up a handful of snow and tossed it in Skye’s direction. Skye held up her hands reflexively to shield her face as the flakes landed on her chest and legs. She fell backwards into the snow with another cloud of powder thrown in her direction.

As the two sat laughing in the snow, a shot exploded from across the fields. Fox sat bolt upright as the bullet whizzed past and struck the side of the building. The mirth left her face in an instant as she began barking orders to Skye.

“Get inside, now! Go!” Fox shouted, pulling her pistol out of her holster on her belt and ducking behind an oak.

Skye dashed inside, adrenaline pulsing through her veins as Fox began to return fire. She ran smack into Anna, who scooped her up and took her to an interior bedroom. Anna sat down on the bed and held Skye on her lap, rocking her back and forth as she stroked the child’s hair. Skye began to sob.

“They’re coming for me, they want to take me away…” the girl shrieked, trying in vain to break free from Anna’s grip.

“Shh, they’re not coming for you, it’s going to be okay,” Anna cajoled with a trembling voice. 

“They stole her, they want me too!!”

“Shhh…. Shhhh…. Fox is going to be fine, nobody is going to steal her, she’s a great sh-”

“Not Fox! Sam! They took Sam!! They want me too!!” Skye began to pull at her hair. Anna grabbed her fists.

“Who’s Sam?” she asked, looking Skye in the face, but the girl was too distressed to answer. Tears streamed down her face as the girl gasped for air between sobs. Anna wrapped her arms around Skye and rubbed her back as she sobbed into Anna’s shirt. 

“Don’t you worry, we’re going to keep you safe, I promise. Sab and Fox are out there, and they’re not going to let anyone touch you, I promise.”

“B-but… what if… they can’t…”

“Little one, Fox and Sab will stop at nothing to keep us safe. Did you know Sab can shoot a muffalo from a hundred yards away? And Fox is the-”

“But… But the blue people… there were a lot of them… and what if they come again… and Fox and Sab can’t…” 

“There aren’t any blue people, Skye, they’re not co-”

“They came and took her away! They wanted to me too!!! The mean people with… with the blue ribbons on their arms!!!”

“There aren’t any-” At that moment, the door burst open with a crack. Skye shrieked in fear as Anna jumped reflexively, only to see Fox limp through the doorway.

“It’s all over, Doc. Care to patch me up?” Fox asked with a tired voice, clutching her shoulder. Blood trickled through her frozen fingers and down the left sleeve of her snow-soaked parka.

Upon hearing Fox’s voice, Skye looked up, jumped off the bed, and ran towards the bleeding woman, wrapping her arms around her stomach.

“Hey!” Fox exclaimed, holding in a shriek of pain. With a weary smile, she rubbed the top of Skye’s head with her elbow, not willing to take her hand from her wound. “Could you… maybe save that until Anna fixes me up?”

\---

Anna tiptoed into Fox’s bedroom with a plate of grilled panther meat, and was slightly relieved to see Fox sit up in bed when she entered. The bandages on her left shoulder were still clean at first glance, which was a good sign.

“She in bed?” Fox whispered. Anna nodded, bringing Fox the plate of food and sitting down at the foot of the bed.

“Sab managed to finish that new room, so she finally got to sleep in her own bed, which means I get my room back, thank goodness.”

“Sab finished? Dang, he took his sweet time, didn’t he?”

Anna laughed. “Yeah, but the bed is beautiful. It’s poplar, I think.”

“Poplar?” Fox whistled. “I wish I had a poplar bed.”

“Steel’s easier for me to clean when you BLEED all over it…”

“Heh, oh yeah…” Fox looked sheepish as she took the meal into her lap. She began to stuff panther meat into her face.

“Mmf, what’d you season this with? Tastes salty,” Fox mumbled around a pile of chewed meat.

“Ew, close your mouth, Fox.” Anna smirked, and Fox swallowed her bite in one gulp.

“Actually,” Anna looked down at her hands, “I wanted to ask you something.”

“Yeah?”

“The invaders, they didn’t have any armbands, did they?”

“Well, there was only one, and no, he didn’t. I think he was from one of the pirate camps. Smelled like it, anyway.” Fox stuffed another chunk of meat into her mouth.

“Hm, okay. Have you ever seen anyone with an armband? A blue one, specifically?”

Fox swallowed. “Nope, not that I can remember. Why do you ask?”

Anna sighed. “Skye said something, is all. Something about blue people coming and taking away a girl named Sam. She seemed really upset.”

Fox paused for a moment. “She said this during the raid?”

“Yeah. She thought they were coming for her.”

Fox furrowed her brows. She put down her meat and began to push back the covers.

“Where are you going?” Anna asked, grabbing Fox’s good arm. Fox tried to shake Anna’s hand off, but her grip was tight.

“I wanna talk to Skye about this, that’s all.”

“Oh, no you don’t,” Anna began to lecture, pulling Fox back onto the bed and putting the blanket over her. “You need to rest, and Skye doesn’t need any more stress today, you got it? We can ask her later, when both of you are feeling better.”

“...Fine.” Fox picked up the rest of her meal. “I guess I’ll see you in the morning then? The sooner I get these off the better…” Fox shrugged her left shoulder and winced.

“Nice try. You’re staying off that shoulder for a few days, and that’s final.” Anna got up, walked through the door, throwing a stern ‘Good night’ over her shoulder before closing the door shut.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't worry, a snowman will have been built by the time the winter is over


	6. Visitors

The snow that came in late autumn stuck around for days. On the fourteenth of Septober, Skye stepped outside under the watchful gaze of Anna, gazing in amazement at the massive snowdrifts against the walls of the base that had appeared overnight. Some were almost as tall as she was.

Anna tugged on Skye’s arm, pulling her behind as the two trudged through the thigh-deep snow. “I’m sorry to be stern, but we really need to chop this wood right now, Skye. Come on.”

The pair chopped wood all morning, the thuds of their axes ringing clear through the silent landscape. Skye said nothing, because Anna said nothing, and tried her best to fell the trees cleanly without any chipping. The logs fell into the snow, one after another, in quiet sighs of defeat.

To Skye, chopping trees was like mining - mindless work that wasn’t hard enough once you got into a rhythm, but that would hurt later, when you were lying in bed waiting for the repose that sleep would bring. The familiar feeling of dread built slowly in her chest as she realized that she would most definitely be sore tomorrow. At least these people seemed more likely to give her a break…

After a couple hours, the biting chill that nipped at Skye’s finger had been replaced by an annoying tingling, and then a dull numbness and then nothing at all. Skye only noticed the color of her hands when she dropped the axe and wasn’t able to pick it back up.

Upon hearing the sharp thud in the snow, Anna turned, her eyes glazed over in a sort of expression that Skye couldn’t place. When she noticed the hands, her face instantly transitioned to one of horror.

“Stuff those hands into your sleeves right now!” Skye quickly complied, confused at Anna’s reaction as the doctor whisked her inside and next to the campfire in the central space.

“Take off your wet parka, and DON’T stick your hands into the fire. I’ll be right back.” Anna grabbed a bowl from the table and rushed outside. 

Skye tried in vain to shrug off the parka, but the garment was too damp to easily unstick from her body. She tried using her hands, but her fingers wouldn’t move, white and numb as they were. 

She began to whine as the realization sunk in. Something was wrong, wrong with her hands, and she had no idea what it meant. She flung her arms around, desperately trying to get the heavy, wet coat off her torso.

“Hey.”

The soft, male voice came from behind. Skye turned around, panic beginning to rise in her chest, as Sab bent down onto his knees.

“Hey, it’s okay. Can I help you get this off?”

Skye nodded, though not relaxing a bit as Sab unbuttoned each button of her parka and slowly pulled it off her body. She waited, breath held in her throat, but Sab simply took the coat and spread it out across a stone by the fire before walking to the other end of the room and picking up a hammer and chisel.

“Your shirt looked pretty dry. I think you’re going to be fine,” he said softly, not looking up from his pile of dark stone blocks. Skye nodded, trying to relax a bit.

Anna came in again, her bowl filled with snow. She set it down close to the flames, and kneeled down next to Skye.

“I’m so sorry I didn’t notice it earlier, little one. I think you’ll be alright, but I still want to warm up your fingers and wrap them up, okay? It might hurt a bit, but it will help them feel better later,” Anna cajoled softly.

“What… What’s wrong with them?” Skye whispered, looking down at her pale fingers.

“It’s the first stage of frostbite. It’s my fault for not warning you about it. You’ve never lived somewhere with snow, have you?”

Skye shook her head.

“Why didn’t you tell me when your fingers started feeling funny?”

Skye shrunk back a bit. “I’m sorry, I… you seemed busy so… so…” 

“Skye, you’re fine, I just need to know these things, okay? I’m the doctor, so it’s my job to keep you feeling healthy, alright?”

Skye nodded, embarrassed. Anna took the bowl, which was now filled with water, and dipped her own fingers in it before placing it in front of Skye.

“I need you to dip your fingers in the water for me. It’s going to sting, but please keep them in the water. We need them to warm up before I can bandage them.”

Skye gingerly stuck her hands into the water, before immediately drawing them back out. Anna gently guided her wrists back to the bowl. 

“I know, it’s not fun, but you need to do this for me, okay? You wanna keep your fingers, right?”

Skye nodded, grimacing.

“I thought so.”

\-----

Skye’s fingers had just been successfully warmed and wrapped, and her appreciation for Anna’s medical skills boosted, when Fox came in from outside, dragging a deer carcass behind her. After single-handedly hauling the deer into the coldroom, she came to stand by the fire and began to warm her hands.

“I think there’s a caravan or something out there,” she said nonchalantly. “They look to be a bulk goods trader, they had a lot of muffalo with them.”

“Was it Tedeslar? Erika mentioned over the radio the other day that she might be sending a group over,” Anna replied.

“Any mention of what they might be bringing?” Fox asked, turning her back to the fire.

“Nope, just that she wanted to send one last caravan before the snow became too deep to travel.”

“I wonder what she meant by that.”

“Excuse me?”

“It sounds like she wants to check on us or something. I wonder how she expects us to be faring.”

Anna looked down, the bandages still in her hands from earlier. She stuffed the rolls into her pockets. “I don’t know,” she replied.

\-----

Sounds of shouts and laughter echoed faintly off the sides of the base as Anna stepped outside to greet the traders. There were six adults, a mix of male and female, and two children, the genders of whom Anna had a hard time discerning under their thick coats and hats.

“Guten Tag!” a tan female with dark hair shouted from the front of the group. Anna waved and ran towards her, bracing for impact as the woman gave her a tight hug.

“Erika! I didn’t think you’d come!” Anna exclaimed after being released from the hug. She gestured to the group to come inside.

“Of course I did! I wanted to make sure you and your people were alright, since the winter came so early this year. Though, I guess you don’t have any other winters to compare this one to, at least not here,” Erika said through a thick, clipped accent as she followed Anna back towards the structure.

“I guess we don’t, though it’s still kind of you to come all this way. You have a town to run.”

“Tedeslar is doing so well, it could run itself,” Erika replied. “I just run the communications and make sure people don’t mess up too poorly.”

“I mean… that’s great! I’m happy for you.” Anna felt her smile slip a bit. She had never been voted official leader, but Sab was usually too quiet for faction relations, and Fox, well…lived too much in the moment to bother herself with colony management. Anna couldn’t help but feel embarrassed about what Erika might think of the current state of things.

Every scuff and patch of dirt on the rough stone floor seemed to glare at Anna as she led the group of traders inside, but they didn’t seem to notice, waltzing right down the hallway to the main room with the campfire. One of the children noticed Skye sitting on the floor and waved cheerfully as the other child hid behind the first. Skye hesitatingly waved back, looking to Fox and Anna for direction.

“I didn’t know your group had a child!” Erika said excitedly. “Where do you come from?” she asked the girl sitting on the floor.

“She crash landed on the other side of the river,” Fox interjected, “and she’s kinda been with us ever since.”

Erika nodded in approval. “I’m glad you did that. Not all colonies on this planet would have done the same.”

Anna nodded. “Skye, why don’t you show the other children your room while the adults talk?”

Skye wordlessly got up and led the two children down the hallway into the bedroom at the end. Once inside, the smaller of the two scrambled up onto the unmade bed. 

“I’m Jenna, and this is my younger brother Taki,” the older child said as she took off her hat. Her mousy brown curls were plastered to her forehead. “You don’t mind that he’s on your bed, do you?”

Skye shook her head no, though she did mind, just a little bit.

“How old are you, anyway?”

Skye hesitated a second. Twelve usually seemed about right, but now she wasn’t so sure. Nobody really kept track in her old colony. “I’m… twelve. Yeah.”

“Well, I’m eight, and Taki is six. He just started school with me, though he really doesn’t pay any attention.” 

Taki shot Jenna an angry look that his sister ignored. “I’m learning times tables in school right now. What are you learning in school?” Jenna continued.

“School?”

“You know, you go and sit with other kids and learn stuff. Like times tables. Do you know your times tables?”

Skye shook her head confusedly. Taki started to jump up and down on her bed with his wet shoes still on.

“She doesn’t ...have school,” Taki shouted between jumps. “She prob’ly…don’t cause… she’s poor.”

“We’re not poor,” Skye said defensively, a little louder this time.

“But you don’t even know your times tables.” Jenna retorted, hands on her hips. “Besides, my mommy said your colony was poor, so it has to be true.”

Taki landed on his butt on the now-wet mattress. “You probably can’t even read!”

“Well, I bet you can’t mine like I can.” Skye said, slowly. Her lips twitched upwards into a smirk. “I dug this colony out of hill with my bare hands.”

“No you didn’t!” Jenna and Taki said in unison.

Skye held up her bandaged hands. “Why do you think I wear these?”

Jenna stepped back a bit, beat for the moment. “Nuh-uh. No way. Nobody can do that.”

“I don’t know, I guess you two haven’t heard of the River Gremlin, have you?”

Jenna, Skye, and Taki all turned to see Fox leaning in the doorway. She was nonchalantly looking at her fingers, which, though caked with dirt, still seemed to merit her approval.

“The river gremlin lives in this very river,” Fox said in a low voice, motioning in the direction of the river. “In fact, it carved out this river with its bare hands.”

Jenna and Taki stared, spellbound, as Fox continued.

“Rumor has it that the river gremlin likes to disguise itself as a girl and eat little children that ask too many questions.”

Jenna looked from Fox, to Skye, and then to Taki before grabbing her brother’s hand and leading him out towards her mother.

Skye looked sheepishly at Fox as the woman’s smirk slipped into a serious expression. “Now, I may have helped you out back there, but I don’t want ya thinking that it’s okay to boast and lie like that, aight?”

“But they were being mean!” Skye shouted, her fingers straining against the bandages as she reflexively tried to ball her hands into fists.

“I know they were, but that doesn’t make it right to lie. Not when you don’t have to.”

Skye looked to the floor. “Were they right? Are we poor?”

“Of course not. We have food, and a fire, and a shelter, and warm clothes. We’re not poor at all.”

“We don’t have a school. They have a school, and they’re learning about tables and reading and stuff. Why don’t we have one?”

Fox thought for a moment. She walked over to Skye, putting her hands on the girl’s shoulders. “You’re right, we don’t have a school. But, we do have teachers. Anna has already been teaching you about crops and woodcutting. She can teach you a whole lot more, if you ask. Sab and I can teach you too, if you want. I know Sab’s been wanting some help with construction.”

“But… what about reading? And times tables?”

Fox looked Skye in the eyes. “We’re going to teach you something more important than reading. We’re going to teach you how to survive.”

Skye still seemed disappointed, casting her eyes down to Fox’s shoes.

“Ya know, reading doesn’t come in handy if you’re dead, right? But, I guess, if you really want to learn, I can ask Anna about it, okay?”

Skye looked up in excitement, and wrapped her arms around Fox in a tight hug. Fox held the girl’s head to her chest as she hugged her back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The treatment that Anna gives Skye is based off official recommendations I found on the National Health Service website. You can see them here: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/frostbite/treatment/
> 
> No, I'm not English, but it was the first credible-looking link I found when I searched 'frostbite treatment' (because WebMD isn't really too reliable)
> 
> Stay warm this winter (if it's winter where you live right now)!


	7. Hard Lessons

“I’m still hungry,” Skye announced one windy mid-winter evening after she had finished her roasted muffalo meat. Fox continued to polish her weapon, as she did after every meal, and Anna continued to clean the food scraps off the table. Sab had left as soon as the meal had ended, heading off to his workbench to carve stone blocks from rubble chunks.

“I said, I’m still hungry,” she said, louder, her voice competing with that of the howling wind outside.

Fox and Anna exchanged glances for a few seconds before the latter spoke up. “I’m sorry Skye, that’s all I’ve made for today. You must be growing! You’re getting to have such a big appetite!” Anna smiled nervously before turning back to her work.

“Can… can you make any more?”

Anna scrubbed faster. “It’s getting late, don’t you think? Maybe you should be getting to bed, Skye.”

“The sun only just set, it’s not THAT late.” Skye retorted, crossing her arms. 

“Well, then, I guess you have time to finish your chores then? Your room is not going to clean itself,” Fox interjected, spinning her pistol on her finger before putting it back in its holster.

Skye narrowed her eyes at Fox before jumping off her chair and running off down the hallway. 

“Ya know, she’s really gotten some sass since she’s been here,” Fox stated once the girl was out of earshot.

Anna didn’t reply, continuing to scrub at the same stove grate despite it being already clean.

“Though, she’s really too old for you to be telling her to go to bed at five thirty. You need to think of some other excuse.” 

Anna sat back on her heels and sighed. “I just, I don’t need her finding out about our current situation. It’s bad enough trying to keep her out of the fridge when she’s hungry. I feel terrible  
about it but… there’s not much I can do. You sure you’ve been hunting everything you can?”

“You know I have. Sab too, but it seems like a lot of the animals have moved on to warmer climates. To graze, probably. We still have our tamed muffalo…”

“I don’t want to go there,” Anna interjected, “not yet. We’ll need coats, and if Skye’s growing then she’ll need new clothes come spring. That wool is more valuable than you think.”

“How much of the rice and potatoes are left?”

“Not much. I’ve been trying to see how far we could go off the meat since it’ll spoil first, but it’s not looking great. We really should have planted corn.”

Fow said nothing, looking down at the gun in her hands and slowly twirling it around her finger. 

“I know, I hate it, but there’s nothing we can really do except hunt all we can and try to make it all last. We can’t really call Erika over now, they’re practically snowed in up in Tedeslar.”

Fox let out a strained laugh. “We could always eat rat, ya know. Tastes not quite as bad as you’d think.”

Anna continued to scrub, this time the floor. “In any other circumstances, I’d tell you no, but keep that one in the back of your head. I want you bringing game in here every day, and if it has to be rats, it has to be rats.”

Fox nodded knowingly, turning her attention back to polishing the colony’s weapons.

\-----

Skye’s stomach growled as she sat with Anna on the floor, trying to focus on her first aid lesson. Breakfast had been meager, with Anna muttering some sort of excuse about the stove breaking and ruining some of the meal. 

“Now, when you treat a gunshot wound, pressure is key. Gunshot wounds are one of the most common injuries out here on the Rim, but that doesn’t mean they have to be deadly! Now, we’re going to treat this ‘patient’ together, alright?”

Anna nodded to Fox, who limped across the room and flopped onto the floor.  
“First, Skye, you need to find out what happened to the patient. What’s wrong, Fox?”

“Oh, my leg hurts,” Fox stated in the most nonchalant tone she could manage. 

“Is that all?”

“Yep.”

“Can you… rate your pain on a scale of, let’s say, one to ten?”

“Two.”

Anna gave Fox a pointed look. “Are you sure?”

Fox looked at her nails, a small smirk across her lips. “‘Tis but a scratch!”

“Could you take this a little more seriously, please?” Anna said through her teeth.

Fox, smiled, and took in a huge breath. “Oh Anna, the pain! The PAIN! I don’t think I’ll be able to go on! I’m going to DIE!”

Skye giggled a little, the pangs of hunger dullening slightly as she watched Anna glare at Fox. Fox threw Skye a wink as Anna sighed and attempted to continue her lesson. 

“Now, you need to make sure your patient is calm* so you can treat them. Get them to breathe with you if it helps them calm down. Skye, why don’t you try calming Fox down?”

Fox sucked in huge dramatic breaths, clutching her leg and rocking back and forth violently. Skye bit her lip, trying to hold back her laughter as Fox wailed at the top of her lungs. 

Anna nudged her. “You’re the doctor here, Skye. Fix this.”

“Fix me!!!!” Fox shouted, and both she and Skye burst out laughing. Anna’s face fell into her hands.

“You two are a mess,” she uttered, pushing herself up off the floor and heading out into the hallway.

“Wait, Anna, I’m sorry,” Fox called out, and Anna stopped, not bothering to turn around.

“Continue the lesson, please. I’m… sorry.”

Anna let out a deep breath. “Are you two actually going to take this seriously?”

Fox looked at Skye, who managed to swallow one last laugh. “Yes, Anna,” Skye whispered.

Anna waited a minute before turning back around. Giving Fox a stern look, she rolled up her sleeves and sat back down on the floor.

“Fine then. Considering that our patient is sufficiently ‘calmed,’ I’m going to show you how to treat this wound, okay?”

Skye nodded, the faintest smile still on her lips.

\-----

After a small dinner of some stringy, stewed meat, Sab led Skye to Fox’s bedroom, an armful of logs held against his chest. He laid them on the floor as Skye sat cross-legged next to the pile, Sab’s toolbox in hand.

“When do we get to chop up the wood?” Skye asked impatiently as Sab began to lay out the logs on the floor, arranging them and rearranging them with a pensive look on his face.

He smiled slightly. “Not yet. First, we need to plan this table.”

Skye folded her arms, sighing frustratedly. “How long will that be?”

“As long as it takes.”

Skye groaned and slumped against the wall.

Sab looked up. “Why don’t you help me? Come over here.”

Skye rolled her eyes and languidly made her way over to the pile. Sab gestured to the myriad logs.

“Which ones look like table legs to you?”

Skye looked over the wood for a while before selecting one of the skinnier pieces with a width about the size of Sab’s fist.

“Hm. Why that one?”

Skye shrugged. “The thicker pieces will be better for the top of a table, cause they’ll make thicker planks when you split them. Legs are all the skinny pieces will be good for.”

“But why that log specifically? This one over here,” Sab said, gesturing to another piece from the pile, “has less knobs and branches. Why not pick this one?”

Skye didn’t look up from her chosen log as she began to pick at the bark. “I just feel like Fox’d like knobby legs better, I guess.”

“And why is that?”

Skye shrugged. “It just looks cool. It’s not like the other pieces of wood. It grew kinda crazy, I guess, in lots of different directions.”

Sab smiled again, his eyes twinkling in the light of the room’s only torch. “You know what’s neat about this piece of wood specifically?”

“Not really.”

“Look here.” Sab turned the log over and pointed to a raised section of bark in the shape of a doughnut. In its center, a dull piece of metal glinted in the torchlight.

“Do you know what this is?” he asked.

Skye squinted in the dim light. “It kinda looks like... like a bullet or something.”

“You’re right. What do you think happened to this tree?”

“It… got shot?”

“Yes. It did. The thing is, this shot should have shattered the wood. But it didn’t. The tree stopped it, which is remarkable for a log of this width. And do you see that?” Sab gestured to the raised ring of wood all around the lodged bullet.

The girl nodded, running her finger around the circle of bark.

“When the bullet got stuck in this tree, the tree didn’t die. It grew around the bullet, and formed this knob, which makes the wood stronger.”

“The tree wasn’t hurt at all?”

“Oh, I’m sure it was hurt for a little while, but instead of staying hurt, it decided to keep growing. And now it’s stronger than it was before.”

“Huh.” Skye took the log of wood back from Sab, and began looking it over with increased curiosity.

“You picked a great piece of wood for the leg. Have you done this before?”

Skye shrugged, turning the wood over and over in her hands. “I’ve worked with wood before, but mostly just to rebuild walls and stuff. Not like this.”

Sab nodded in understanding. “Well, I think you’re doing a good job so far. How about you try planning the rest of the table?”

\-----

The frozen snow crunched under Fox’s boots in the dim light of the not-quite-risen sun. The landscape before her dressed itself in light blues and greys, the naked trees making vague, sprawling shadows on the ground.

While walking far enough from the walls of the base so as not to wake the others, it wasn’t hard for Fox to notice the effect that rationing meals was starting to have on her body. Her legs ached, and her arms trembled under the weight of Sab’s hunting rifle. She wrapped her parka closer to her body and slung the rifle across her shoulders to relieve some of the stress on her arms.

Her eyes scanned the ground and horizon for any sign of movement. Her vision wavered for a bit, the trees seeming to sway with a non-existent wind. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw it - no, she saw them.

Glinting in the first rays of the morning sun, Fox watched the cargo drop pods arc gracefully out from behind a thick cloud and land with a soft crunch into the snow beyond the icy river.

It was like being lit on fire, hope.

\-----

“Anna… get up!”

Anna’s head spun as she struggled to pull herself out of the last few remnants of her dream. Someone was shaking her awake - violently.

“Supply pods… across the river… could be food!”

At the mention of food, Anna snapped awake. Her head spun as Fox dragged her into a sitting position and started to shove her feet into her boots with her wet, frozen hands.

“What did you say?”

“Supply drop, across the river, we have to go get it now before something else gets it! C’mon!” Fox pulled Anna up, her shoelaces dragging behind her as the two stumbled outside and through the frozen sheets of snow that reached halfway up Anna’s calves.

It seemed to take hours of walking to follow Fox’s trail of stomped-down snow that led up to the river, and even longer to tiptoe and pray that she wouldn’t break the fragile layer of ice that kept her from the frigid waters below. The only thing keeping her going was the slim possibility of rations on the other side.

Maybe some traders had accidentally shipped their cargo to the wrong planet. Or perhaps it was a humanitarian offering from one of the more well-off colonies. Maybe Erika had sent them, fresh from the new hydroponic farms that Tedeslar boasted. Anna couldn’t help but wonder, in a flurry of rash hope, if someone had been watching over their little settlement.

She had just reached the other side of the river when Fox, who had bounded up ahead, started to pick through the broken remains of the hulls of the cargo pods. Anna watched as Fox’s smile dropped, and the young woman stepped back from the warped metal sheets, letting loose a string of curses into the sky.

“What? What is it?” Anna felt the pounding in her chest grow louder as her heart began to sink.

“Just come look. Just come f***ing look.” 

Anna peered into the dense tangle of metal, reached down, and picked up a lightweight box the size of a loaf of bread. It read “Smokeweed - Cordaie’s Finest!”

“Wait, is… the whole…” Anna started to shake as she dropped the box into the snow. She suddenly became aware of just how tired she felt, right down to the bones.

Fox nodded. “The whole f***ing shipment. It’s all weed. All of it.”

Anna’s limbs grew leaden. She stood there in the snow, just breathing in the frigid air as Fox kicked the twisted bits of metal and shouted at nobody. Had she really believed that someone would bother to send aid? That someone would care about the tiny, insignificant lives of four people scratching a living out of the soil with their bare hands?

It got quiet all of a sudden. Anna looked up to see Fox’s tired, bloodshot eyes, seeking hers for guidance. Her fists were balled up tight and trembling. Anna realized, in that moment, that she had never seen Fox so distressed before.

“Well…” Anna fumbled around for words. “It’s… gonna be okay. We’ll just…” she took in a deep breath, “... carry on like before.”

Fox looked away, taking the opportunity to kick another piece of metal. She slowly picked up Sab’s rifle from where she dropped it in the snow and swung it over her shoulder like it had the weight of three guns. Anna looked back to the smoking pile of drugs, and started to pick the boxes up out of the wreckage. She’d have to figure out where to hide them later.

The footsteps in the snow rang out like gunshots as Fox trudged off towards the distant hills. “Hope you’re ready to cook more rat tonight,” she grumbled, not bothering to turn around.

Anna wanted nothing more than to fall into the snow, to take a moment to breathe as the slow feeling of impending doom fell upon her tired shoulders, but the rising sun brought a new day, and a new day brought tireless hours of rationing and sorting, of skinning every tiny animal that Fox and Sab brought back, of telling Skye to please stay out of the storage room and to for goodness sakes finish rolling those bandages. She didn’t have any time, or energy, to waste.

So she took a breath, and trudged back home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * Ideally, Skye would call 911 upon recognizing a life-threatening injury such as a gunshot wound, but that's not really an option on this planet.


	8. Battles of Many Kinds

“Fox, what do we need all this lumpy steel for?” Skye asked, arms aching under the weight of the twisted sheet of metal as she made her fifth trip back to the base from across the river.

Fox huffed, lifting her piece of steel higher up on her shoulders. “Sab thinks we might be able to melt these down and re-use ‘em. Beats mining, anyways.”

Skye would have shrugged if she could, making a slight nod instead. The two trudged quietly through the snow, the frozen chunks crunching under their boots. They deposited the pieces in the pile in front of the door and slowly made their way back to the crash site through the calf-deep snow.

Fox and Skye were already loading their arms full of steel again when Fox looked up, her facial expression severe. “Hush, be quiet,” she ordered Skye as she dropped her steel and put her hand to her holster.

“What is--” Skye was cut off by the echoing sound of a gunshot and a rush of cold to her face as Fox shoved her violently into the snow behind a large lump of metal.

“Stay down!” Fox shouted as she knelt behind another piece of metal, firing her pistol in the direction of the rocky outcroppings behind the wreckage site.

Skye felt herself seize up more and more with each gunshot she heard. A raid. This was a raid. Another raid. What do they want? Did they want her? Oh gosh, what if they took her? What if she was taken like Sam? Each thought hit her like a fist in the gut, leaving her trembling but otherwise immobile where she crouched behind the wreckage.

Skye looked up from her little pocket of snow to watch Fox as she ducked behind her piece of metal, reloaded her revolver from another pouch at her hip, and popped up again to fire at the unseen intruder. Already she was bleeding from her cheek, but she didn’t seem to notice as the blood dripped down her face and neck and onto her parka. Skye reflexively ducked down further into her hole in the snow as a bullet whizzed by, slicing through the left sleeve of Fox’s parka. Skye expected Fox to stop, but she simply looked down, groaned, and continued shooting. 

Skye’s eyes grew wide as blood slowly seeped through the sleeve and formed a small red circular stain. She tried warning Fox, but only a squeak could escape her mouth.

“Stay down! I know!” Fox shouted over the din, taking noticeably longer to reload her rounds. She gritted her teeth as she forced her shaking fingers to deposit the bullets into the chamber. Holding her left arm protectively against her side, she fired another round of bullets, firing her last one by the time the attacker stopped returning fire. Fox took in a deep breath, the silence hitting her like a wall. She reloaded her revolver again, eyes scanning the landscape for any other hostiles. 

Skye poked her head up from behind the metal wreckage. 

“Get down!” Fox barked, her voice low. “We don’t know if there are any more.”

Skye ducked her head down, trying to peer through the cracks in the metal slats. Her heart filled with relief, and her veins with adrenaline, when she saw nobody else beyond the wreck site. Looking back towards the base, she watched the tiny figures of Anna and Sab as they situated themselves behind the rocks and trees close to the base.

“Hey! We’re ove-” Skye began to shout as Fox slammed a hand over her mouth. 

“Don’t call any attention to them!” Fox whispered into Skye’s ear before moving her focus back to the hills and trees beyond the wreckage. With Fox’s back turned, Skye looked back over to Sab and Anna across the river. Sab looked like he was aiming his rifle, but Anna was waving her arms around frantically. Skye waved her hand at Anna, and Anna continued to wave her hands, more frantically this time.

“What are you doing!?” Fox grabbed Skye’s hand.

“The guy is gone, Fox,” Skye muttered, her voice trembling. “We can go back now! I wanna go back!”

“You’re going to stay right he-” Fox was interrupted by a noise, the ever-so-quiet footstep crunch in the snow. Slowly, she turned back towards the trees, gripping her revolver tight. In a split second, Skye took her chance and started to run as fast as she could through the snow towards the river bank. 

A second boot crunched in the snow, somewhere amidst the trees. Fox whipped instinctively around back to Skye, and upon seeing her running off towards the base, she immediately bolted after her.

“Get down, get down, there’s another one!!”

Skye turned all-too-slowly as Fox leapt at her, shoving her to the ground as another gunshot rang out. Buried once again in the snow with Fox’s body on top of her, Skye began to panic. She struggled to push Fox off of her, the twenty-something young woman limp like a fish as Skye rolled her over in the snow. 

A red stain bloomed like a flower on the white ground from underneath Fox’s abdomen. Skye’s breath caught in her chest as she noticed the blood, the rest of the scenery fading out as the beating of her heart filled her ears. Fox was saying something, something, but Skye couldn’t make it out. Her hands trembled, trying in vain to remember Anna’s lesson about gunshot wounds. Images flashed in her mind, brief flashes here and there, but nothing came.

Another gunshot echoed from overhead, and Skye dropped reflexively into the snow as the bullet whizzed past and struck a rock behind her. Across the river, the distant voice of Anna rang out. 

“Skye! Pressure! Pressure!!”

Pressure. All of a sudden, the lesson came back to her, quick as the bullets Sab was starting to fire across the river. Struggling, Skye rolled the grimacing Fox onto her stomach, took off her own parka, balled it up, and pressed the garment to the wound with all of her strength. The frigid air nipped at Skye’s arms and torso through her long-sleeve shirt, causing the girl to tremble as she knelt in the snow. Bullets whizzed back and forth overhead. Skye ducked lower into the snow, slowly inching Fox’s body towards the metal wreckage in hopes of more cover. 

The warmth of Fox’s blood was starting to leak through the parka to Skye’s fingers. Panicking, the girl folded the parka over on itself and continued to press it into Fox’s back. She was going to have to secure it somehow. Teeth chattering from adrenaline and cold, she folded the parka over again and, with one hand on Fox, Skye used her free hand to rip off one of the sleeves of her button-up shirt. With trembling fingers, she tied the ends of the shirtsleeve around Fox’s torso, securing the parka in place. She then moved to examine Fox’s arm, and deciding the slow bleed didn’t indicate damage to an artery, tore off her other sleeve and wrapped it twice around Fox’s forearm before knotting it.

During all this, Fox had been incoherent, first grimacing in pain, then mumbling with a voice so low Skye couldn’t make out any words, then panting in an effort not to scream. Not once did she look Skye in the eyes.

Skye couldn’t remember what it was she was supposed to do after bandaging the wound, so she just took Fox’s hand, rocking back and forth in the snow in an attempt to work up some body heat. Not knowing what else to do, all the girl had left was to stay low, avoid the bullets flying back and forth, and wait for Sab to end it.

Until Fox’s eyes grew wide, that is. Until the woman made such pained sounds and gestured her arms towards something, something beyond, that Skye mistook her warnings for the incoherence that accompanies blood loss.

Skye felt herself knocked forward for the third time that morning, but this time with a force so great that her head spun when she lifted it up out of the snow. Scrambling to get out of the snow and away from her assailant, she felt her body yanked upwards by her arm. Another arm wrapped around her stomach, forcing her backwards against the torso of the attacker.

“Help, Sab! Please!!” she screamed with every ounce of energy she possessed. She began to sob, feeling the arm around her torso tighten until it became hard to breathe. 

A gruff voice boomed from above her head. “Don’t you dare move, little lady.” She felt the cold, sharp edge of a knife up against her throat. She couldn’t help but continue to cry, the tears beginning to stream down her face.

“Let’s have a deal! Shall we?” The higher voice belonged to another man, walking out from behind the trees with his arms raised, a revolver in one hand. His parka was light brown, and lightly spattered with fresh, bright blood.

“Your group’s penchant for mercy has become known throughout the region. Not uncommon for greenies like you.”

Sab’s voice echoed out from behind the trees. “What is your point?”

“My point is that I know that you don’t want to attack unless you have to. And you don’t have to. Because we’re going to cut you a deal.”

“What’s your deal already?” Anna shouted.

The man’s view became icy. “I wasn’t talking to you!” He turned back towards Sab. “Simply put, you let us have this girl, and nobody else has to die. How does that sound?” he cajoled, his words dripping acid.

“What if we refuse?” Sab replied.

The man cracked his neck menacingly. “Then there’s more blood on your hands than you bargained for, right Flint?” He gestured towards the man holding Skye, who let out a low chuckle.

For several moments, Skye heard nothing but Flint’s breaths down her neck and the soft sounds of Fox writhing in pain in the snow. 

“Well?” the man in brown inquired, with frustration.

Sab looked at Anna, and then to Fox, and then back to the man. Slowly, slowly, he began to lower his gun. Skye’s pulse quickened as she watched Flint’s partner curl his lips into a smile.

“That’s it, there’s a good man-”

Crack. The sound reverberated off the wreckage and trees, abruptly finishing the terse discussion. The man in brown was still for a second as he crumpled to the ground, clutching his bloodied calf, freshly shattered by Fox’s bullet. Flint, surprised to suddenly find Sab’s gun pointed at him and not lowered as it was seconds earlier, grabbed Skye tightly, only to let her go and turn tail when Sab’s warning shot flew over his head. Skye dropped to the snow, taking several deep breaths as Sab waded across the river to carry Fox and Anna rushed over to check for injury.

It was over. It was finally over. Great, gasping sobs came over Skye, but hunched over there, in the snow, with blood on her hands and bruises on her exposed arms, no tears came.

\-----

The man was restrained, taken into Anna’s room, and bandaged up. Fox too, was carried into her own bedroom by Sab, with Skye following silently. She stayed, holding Fox’s hand as she did earlier as the woman whispered incoherently in a scratchy voice. She would have stayed like that for the rest of the day, but when Anna removed the parka tied to Fox’s abdomen, she shooed Skye out with a shaking voice.

Now Skye was seated at the dining table, running her finger gently over the ridges in the chamber of Fox’s revolver. She had her knees drawn up to her chest, with her head resting languidly on the tabletop. She felt… guilty. Guilty and shaken and scared, so scared, with a layer of numb, drenching fatigue layered over it all. Anna’s shocked face was seared in her mind, the look of sheer horror when she lifted that makeshift bandage. It was all her fault. It was all her fault, and now Fox was…she was...

She heard footsteps enter from the hallway, and looked up abruptly, hoping that it would be Anna with good news, or even Fox, miraculously healed, but it was just Sab, carrying a bowl of dirty water. Upon seeing the girl curled up, he quickly disposed of the water before coming to sit next to her.

“Can I have this?” he asked of Fox’s revolver, slowly pulling it away from Skye when she said nothing. The girl curled herself tighter, resting her head on her knees. She was shaking.

Sab quietly took off his own parka, laying it gently over Skye’s bare arms. She didn’t seem to react.

“Anna told me that you did a good job, bandaging Fox,” Sab offered. “She wants you to know that she is very proud of you. You saved Fox by doing that.”

Skye sniffed, wiping her nose with the back of her hand, streaking half-dried blood across her face. “She… she… she looked… at the wound… and it… her face… like Fox was doomed…” she said between gasps, feeling the sobs wash back over her body again. “It’s… I did that… it’s my fault…”

“It is not your fault,” Sab said calmly. “You did your very best. You gave her your parka and your shirtsleeves even though it was freezing, and in the middle of a raid no less. That was one the bravest things I have ever seen anyone do.”

“But… but I ran! And then… she got shot! And… and…” Her voice broke off into a series of sobs as she began to cry into the sleeve of Sab’s shirt. Sab gently placed his arm around Skye’s shoulders.

The two remained there for a while, Skye crying and Sab sitting quietly, until the tears had run out and the girl was once again wiping her nose with her shaking fingers. Sab quietly moved to heat up a bowl of water, and with a scrap of fabric from the storeroom, he started to wipe the blood and dirt from Skye’s face.

“I have an idea to help Fox, and if you want, you can help me,” Sab offered as he started to wipe the blood off of Skye’s hands.

Skye seemed to sit up a bit, looking into Sab’s face with expectation. “What… what is it?”

Sab smiled slightly. “Fox’s parka has been beat up by the raid today. To be honest, it was old to begin with. I was hoping maybe you can help me make her a new one.”

“I… I don’t know how to sew.”

“That’s okay. I can show you.” Sab got up, leaving the bowl and rag on the table, bidding Skye follow him to the storage room. There, he sat down in front of a pile of animal skins in the corner and began to lay them out on the floor for Skye to look at.

Sab waited patiently as Skye looked over each pelt with a vacant expression, before coming to rest her hand on the thick pelt of a brown bear. She ran her fingers through its course, dense fur before holding it out to Sab, who nodded in approval before taking it to the tailoring bench and laying it out for measuring.

“If I may ask, why this one?” he asked, flipping the skin over and reaching for a charcoal pencil to mark a pattern.

Skye wrapped Sab’s parka, which was still over her shoulders, closer around her body. “It looked like… like it would be warm. And Fox is strong, like bears are.”

Sab grinned. “You’re exactly right.” He motioned Skye to sit down at the bench, and the two began their project.

\-----

Fox was asleep by the time she was done. Anna tried to tell herself that it was solely due to fatigue and the herbs she used as a light anaesthetic, but the worry kept creeping in. That Fox had lost too much blood. That there was internal bleeding somewhere, somewhere that Anna couldn’t see when she was removing the bullet. That the wounds had already invited millions of bacteria into the body.

Of these, Anna knew the last was the most likely. She also knew it was the hardest to detect. Anna had monitored Fox’s heart rate and respiratory rate several times over the last few hours, and while they were rushed and frantic when she was brought inside, they had steadied after about two hours.

Fox was lucky to get this far. Or just insanely strong, more like. But there was still much more danger to come.

Anna surveyed her handiwork for the last time before deciding there was nothing left to do for now. There was Fox, freshly stitched and bandaged, in a ratty old t-shirt of Sab’s that she had him fetch from the storage room to replace Fox’s torn, bloodied shirt. There were several bowls on the wooden table, filled with bloody rags and dirty water, and smelling of crushed herbs. There were the leftover bandages, tossed haphazardly onto the chair, one half-unrolled and trailing onto the floor.

The doctor gathered up the scattered remains of her work, slipped silently into the hallway, and passed through the door facing the river, taking care not to draw attention to herself. She just didn’t feel like talking at the moment.

At the river, she began dumping out the wastewater from the bowls and rinsing the rags before wringing them out and laying them out on a rock. Her hands would have become painfully cold had they not already been numb.

The last rag having painstakingly washed clean, Anna moved to stack the bowls before she just… stopped. The reality of the whole situation dropped on her like a ton of bricks.

Fox could have died. Fox could still die. And without her hunting, there’d be less to eat. Less food to give to more people, now that they had a prisoner. And one less person to protect the colony. One less friend.

Anna looked down at the ripples in the water. A cry of anguish bubbled up from deep in her chest and burst out her mouth. With it came a feeling of weakness, the immobilizing fear that she had no power at all. No power to protect the child she swore to herself she’d bring up. No power to keep her friends fed, or even alive. No power to prevent disaster in the colony she never asked to lead, on a planet she never asked to crash on.

She stuffed her hand in her mouth, willing herself to calm down, willing the gripping fear back into the pit of her stomach. ‘I’ll stop shaking now,’ she thought. ‘I’ll pick up these bowls, and I’ll go back inside, and I’ll go to bed. And then the day will be over. And then tomorrow, I’ll get back to work.’

She took her hand out of her mouth, and drew in large, frigid breaths. ‘Remember your training,’ she shouted at herself from inside. ‘If you just keep working, if you just keep working until spring, it’ll be fine.’

She picked up the bowls and languidly made her way back to the shelter. Gave monosyllabic answers to questions from Sab that she didn’t hear as she laid the wet rags out by the fire to dry. Robotically checked the lock on her bedroom door to make sure the man was still inside. Made no comment as Skye dragged a fur sleeping bag into Fox’s bedroom. And finally, finally, climbed into Skye’s bed before falling into a dreamless sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One of my friends from school commented that there weren't enough gunshots and explosions in my writing. Well, here ya go ;)


	9. The Act of Healing

Sab awoke with a start, his head on the kitchen table and his hand on Fox’s gun. Head foggy, he looked to the fire and, seeing that it was dwindling, he carried an armful of sticks from storage and began feeding the wood into the flames. 

He remembered, upon seeing Anna’s bowls stacked up near the stove and the rags drying on a stone, the events of the day before. It felt almost like a dream, like something his brain had made up to explain why he hadn’t gone to bed.

Sab couldn’t pretend he wasn’t worried. He’d be lying to himself if he did. But at the same time, he felt strangely grateful. Grateful that Fox had such a strong, fighting spirit. Grateful that Anna had skilled hands and a sharper mind. Grateful that Skye was learning quickly, and showed potential to grow up into a capable young woman.

He hadn’t been lying when he said he was amazed by Skye’s tending to Fox in the middle of battle. Realizing that Skye was braver than he had been when he was her age filled him with a sort of paternal admiration. The girl was, in a way, his adopted daughter, as she was Fox’s and Anna’s.

But on the flip side of that admiration was fear, as Sab came once again to the terrifying idea that the tiny colony on the river was in no way suitable for a child. The raids, the food shortage, the lack of proper medical equipment… no child should have to grow up with challenges like these. 

‘Then again,’ Sab thought, slipping on his parka and hefting a shovel over his shoulder, ‘what child of a rimworld does grow up in safety?’ He surely hadn’t, and though he hadn’t asked the others, he had a sinking suspicion that they hadn’t, either. Maybe only glitterworld children had that luxury.

Sab slipped outside, surveying the snowy landscape under the rosy glow of the rising sun. He knew he had no power to give Skye the security she deserved. There would be raids, no matter where she found herself on this planet, and there would be famines, and plagues, and plentiful other disasters outside his control. He could, however, do his best to protect her, and Fox and Anna, from the crises he could predict.

Which is why Sab stuck his spade into the frozen snow and started marking out plans for barricades. 

\-----

He awoke in an unfamiliar bed, his hands bound together with ropes and his leg tied tightly to a straight tree branch. The pain radiating from the wounds on his arms and leg was severe, but not enough to limit mental functions. He laughed to himself a little. Leave it to the newbies in the region to actually treat the wounds of an enemy. With any luck, they’d actually let him free, after which he’d go back to the nearest pirate settlement, tell the others about the weaknesses of this base, and be rewarded handsomely for it. He could milk this place, if he really wanted to. Come back and raid again, get captured, bring back more information, and repeat. Eventually he could know enough to get into the storerooms undetected, and that’s when he’d bring back the bacon.

He had to force himself to stop. The idea was almost too good to be true, which of course made it somewhat fallible. Still, though, the chances did look good that he’d leave here intact, if first impressions were to be believed.

The latch on the door jiggled annoyingly before the door creaked open, revealing the woman who tended to his wounds yesterday, the one that didn’t seem to carry any weapons. She wore a pair of patched synthread pants and a matching button-down shirt, and a homemade-looking smock with pockets. She carried in a cup of water and a bowl, set them down on the table, and began to fiddle with the cloth bands on his calf.

“So… looks like you came around to my offer, huh babe?” he flirted, trying his best to make his voice sound smooth.

The woman’s eyes shot daggers at him before turning back to the wound on his leg. “I’m here solely to treat your injuries and ask a few questions. Do believe me when I remind you that I’m not interested in any interactions besides that,” she said in a stern voice. “If you can accept that, then we’ll get along just fine.”

She certainly didn’t look like she wanted to even get along, but the prisoner decided it was probably best to keep his mouth shut while the doctor was tending to the wounds he was lucky to have tended to. Not knowing her name, and figuring that he likely wouldn’t for a while, he mentally flagged her Doc. 

“Now,” Doc said while crushing a handful of herbs in the bowl she placed on the table earlier, “tell me your name, and the settlement you come from.”

He wasn’t going to tell her his real name of course, so he settled on his brother’s instead. “I’m Redver, and I came from the Night Raven camp.” 

Doc nodded, though he couldn’t really figure out whether or not she believed him. “I’ve heard of that camp. The one far to the east of here. You’re telling me your group came from the east, only to circle far around our territory, cross the river to get to that wreck site, and inevitably cross the river again if you managed to make it to our base? I find that unlikely.”

The prisoner paused. He honestly hadn’t expected Doc to know that much. 

“No matter,” Doc said after a while. “That’s not really what I cared to know anyways.” She finished crushing her herbs, which were now a thin, greenish paste. “What I do want to know,” she continued, spreading the paste on his wound, “is why you tried to take our child from us.”

He tried his best not to wince at the stinging sensation on his calf. “Well… you see…” he muttered, scrambling for some sort of answer.

Doc stiffened, her fingers less careful as she slapped more stinging paste onto his leg. “I’m not fooling around here, Mr. Redver, if that really is your name.” She slammed the bowl onto the table, flecks of green flying into the air. 

He couldn’t help but snort a little at the sight of her all upset. “Fiesty little lady now, aren’t ya?” 

Doc took in a deep breath before whipping a bandage out of her pocket, unrolling rapidly with a rrrrrrriiiip! “I’ll have you know, I’m the leader here. Your fate is entirely in my hands.”

“You, the leader of this place? Aren’t you a little too hormonal for that?”

Doc began wrapping his leg with unrivaled speed. She said nothing, her lips pursed in anger and concentration. 

“Then again, I guess it explains a lot about this place-”

He almost cried aloud as Doc cinched the bandage way too tight for comfort. Then, in a voice that was so threatening it rivaled that of his boss, with a volume so low it just barely registered, she said, “For every word you use to insult me, that’s another step towards being thrown into the snow with a broken calf. If you value your life, you’re gonna cut the crap, and tell me why you wanted to steal a child.”

The prisoner could barely keep from shouting at the pain from the bandage. “Alright… alright, just… let it loose…”

Doc loosened the bandage slightly, looking at him expectantly.

He sighed. “We got news of a large accidental cargo drop that crashed down near here. It was supposedly full of weed, or something like that.” 

Doc suddenly got this weird look on her face. “Continue.”

“My boss figured we could go pick it up for ourselves, or maybe sell it or something. That stuff’s gold here, ya know.”

“I’m aware.”

“But when Flint and I got here, it was all gone, and that chick and the kid were there, so Flint and I figured we could knock the lady down and drag the kid back. Not as valuable as he weed, but something at least.”

Doc looked overly concerned. “And what would you have done with her?”

“We figured we could hold her for ransom or something. If your people didn’t come with the money, we figured we could have sold her or something. Dabnariam buys kids from time to time.”

“You mean, as a slave?”

“What else do you think I could mean?”

Doc turned around, her hand pressed to her forehead. “And you would be fine with that. Selling a child.” Her words were icy.

“I mean, money is money. I wouldn’t have tried if I wasn’t dirt broke. I’m not a barbarian.”

“Ha, yeah, like that’s a valid excuse.” Doc angrily grabbed her things from the table and stormed out of the room, leaving him alone.

\-----

Fox awoke uneasily, her head in a fog and her vision blurry. Unsure of where she was for a minute, she tried to sit up, immediately regretting the decision. Her left arm and her abdomen ached immensely. She groaned aloud, clumsily trying to wipe the sleep out of her eyes.

“YOU’RE AWAKE!!”

Fox jumped a little in her bed, now fully awake. Skye was there, by her bedside, hopping excitedly with the largest grin on her face. Even through her pain, Fox smiled at the sight.

“How… are you? You didn’t… get hurt yesterday, right?” the woman croaked.

At the mention of yesterday’s events, Skye stopped hopping. “Yeah, I’m okay.” She looked away, her expression turning sour.

Fox reached out with her good arm and tousled Skye’s hair. “You sure?”

“Yeah… just… I… well, I ran. And… it got you…” Skye balled up her fists, her face turned towards the floor.

“Hey, listen, you were scared. It’s okay.”

Skye was silent for a few moments. Fox’s energy being mostly spent, she flopped back down onto her pillow. 

“You know, any one of us would take a bullet for you, Skye. You know that, right?”

Skye looked to Fox, her facial expression indecipherable. She reached over and gave the woman a hug, and Fox hugged her back, gently, rubbing Skye’s shoulder with her good hand.

After a minute, Anna came in, opening the door and setting down her things on Fox’s table with quick sharp movements. 

“Ah, Doc,” Fox piped up as Skye pulled away and sat down on her sleeping back on the floor, “what’s the verdict?”

“That’s exactly what I came in here to find out, isn’t it?” Anna said sharply.

“Nah, not me, the prisoner guy. What’d he tell ya?”

Anna slammed her tweezers down onto the tabletop with a thud. “I have never, ever come so close to breaking my oath as I did just now. The man is vile.”

“What’s… what’s an oath?” Skye asked from the floor.

“It’s kinda like a promise,” Fox offered.

“It is a promise,” Anna asserted. “When I became a medic, on my home planet, I swore a vow that I would never harm another person. It’s called the Hippocratic Oath, and it’s very, very old - a practice as old as some of the ancient Earth people.”

“Is that why you don’t have a gun like Fox and Sab do?”

“Yes, you could say that. I try my best to live by the oath. But… that man… I have never wanted to strangle anyone so much.” Anna bound her hands into fists.

“What did he do?”

She let out a large sigh. “You don’t need to know.” Washing her hands off in one of the bowls she brought in, she made her way over to Fox’s bedside. “Now, Skye, if you want to help me out for a few minutes, I can give you another lesson, okay? Do you mind it, Fox, if she stays and watches for a bit?”

“As long as she’s cool I guess.”

Skye nodded, getting up from the floor and making her way over to the bed as Anna began to unwrap the bandages on Fox’s abdomen. She reached out to touch the cloths before Anna swatted her hand away with an elbow. 

“Not before you wash your hands. After you do that, bring me my herbs and pestle.”

Skye did as she was asked, and together the two carefully unwrapped Fox’s bandages, cleaned the wounds with fresh water, applied an herbal salve, and finally redressed the wounds. By the end of the procedure, Skye’s hands were steadier with the bandages than before, and while the salve she mixed was grainier than Anna would have liked, she couldn’t help but feel proud of the girl’s progress.

“You’ve done well, my little student,” Anna said, beaming, after the two washed their hands again. “How about you take those things out to wash with Sab? You can play when you’re done.”

Skye obeyed, seeming a little lighter than before. She exited the room with the stack of bowls and rags in her arms, leaving Fox and Anna alone.

“That praise meant a lot to her, ya know. She’s been feeling really bad about yesterday.”

“You mean, she feels responsible?” Anna sat gingerly at the foot of the bed.

“Mm hm. Don’t know how to tell her it’s not her fault, ya know?”

Anna clasped her hands together and placed them in her lap. “This is going to sound terrible, but I didn’t even think about that.”

“You’ve been busy. ‘S not your fault,” Fox replied, trying to pull herself to a sitting position. She got about halfway up before wincing and falling back onto the mattress.

“Don’t sit up,” Anna said reflexively. Fox just nodded from her pillow.

“I guess, now that I think about it, I wouldn’t say I’m mad at her. Frustrated, yes, but not mad. I just want her to be safe… and, well…”

“She didn’t make it easy.” Fox offered.

“Yeah, you could say it like that. Though, I mean, she is a child. It’s not like she can completely control her panic.”

Fox let out a small laugh. “You can’t even do that.”

Anna nodded slightly, conceding. “Still, though, it’s not safe, for her to be doing that.” She was silent for a moment, looking down at her hands as she fiddled with her thumbs. “I was thinking, yesterday, after everything happened, and it occurred to me that we might not have the means to… keep her safe.”

“What do you mean?”

“Think about it, Fox! We haven’t had enough to feed ourselves, and now… two crazy men can just come and try to take her? You know what that prisoner told me? He told me he’d have sold her! A child! Sold her! I just… I can’t…” Anna put her head in her hands.

“Do you… do you ever think maybe… she’d be better somewhere else?” Anna asked after a minute of silence.

Fox sighed. “I dunno. Where would we even send her? We don’t have a ship or anything… Unless…”

“Unless what?”

“Think about Erika and her people. They have kids there, in Tedeslar, and a school, and probably more security than we do. She’d be safe, and well fed, and she could learn to read…”

Anna slapped her forehead. “Oh, I completely forgot about her wanting to read. She does need to learn… How could I have been so-”

“Relax, Anna, you haven’t had any time to think about it. We know you’ve been trying your best.”

Anna paused a second, thinking. “You do have a point, though. She would be safer there. Just, I hate to send her away, I’ve gotten so… attached I guess.”

“It was just an idea, Anna, don’t get so worked up about it now. Besides, we don’t even know if Erika’s people would take her.”

Anna took in a deep breath. “You’re right. We’ll talk it over with Sab later, and then we’ll call Erika. Besides, we have other things to discuss.”

“Oh yeah, this prisoner, right. Ugh.” Fox tried in vain to sit up again. “Help me up?”

“Sure.” Anna propped up Fox’s pillow and pulled the woman up into a sitting position.

“Thanks.” Fox balled her hands into fists. “So, what did the little jerkwad have to say to you?”

“He just… He claimed that he was only here for the weed, but he said he’d have taken Skye if he couldn’t find any… Made me wanna slap him, talking about a child like that, like a commodity.”

Fox looked away. “Man, wish I could get up and give him a piece of my mind… Can’t…” she shifted a little against the pillow, “can’t stand anyone threatening Skye like that.”

Anna sat back against the wall, her feet dangling off the bed. “You realize we’re taking this much more seriously than we did the other raids… can’t help but feel justified, though.”

“Cause we weren’t the only ones at stake,” Fox replied. “Protecting yourself is one thing, but protecting a child… that’s another.”

“Yeah.” Anna jumped off the bed and walked across the room, seemingly inspecting the wall. “What should we do about him though? There’s a part of me…that wants to leave him out in the snow, just leave him there.”

“To die?”

Anna leaned sideways against the wall, keeping her gaze to the floor. “...Yeah.”

Fox shrugged. “I don’t blame you. I wanna do that too.”

“Like, I know it’d be wrong, and against the oath, and common decency for that matter, but…”

“You can’t help but feel that he deserves it?”

Anna nodded. “I won’t, of course, you don’t have to worry about that, but I still feel like I’m gonna let him off too easy. Like I have to punish him somehow.”

“Yeah, I getcha.” Fox fiddled with the hem of the blanket. “You just…” She sighed. “Where I came from, there were a lot of people like that. Depraved scumbags, doing the wrong things for mostly wrong reasons. And it’s like a fire, this little fire eating you up, telling you to take your revenge, that they deserve it and all.” She dropped the blanket hem, leaning back into the pillow and resting her head on the headboard. “But you have to let it go. Cause you know, that if you take your revenge, then you’re just like them. You do just enough, to defend yourself and anyone you care about, but after that? You have to let the malice go. It’s… really hard. But if you want to be able to sleep at night, you have to let it go.”

Fox yawned, sinking lower into the mattress. “Then again, I don’t think it’d hurt to give him some chores to do while he’s healing. Mending or something like that. You wanna let him know it’s not all peaches-and-cream or whatever, that we’re not ecstatic he’s been such an a**hole.”

“Yeah, that’s not a bad idea.” Anna was silent for a while. After a few minutes, she pushed herself off the wall and moved back across the room to Fox’s bed.

“We’re gonna have to treat him for a while, ya know. Possibly to the end of the season. I don’t know if we have enough food to feed him.”

“Well, we’ll probably have to eat less, but we’ll make it mostly intact. And when he can walk… he’s leaving.” Fox sighed. “You don’t need to give me as much, considering I’m here in bed and all-”

“No, you need to stay healthy so you can heal.” Anna crossed her arms over her chest. “You’ll eat what I give you, no complaining.”

Fox laughed, her voice tired and low. “Just make sure Skye gets enough. She needs to be able to grow - can’t have two midgets in the colony now.”

Anna rolled her eyes. “Thanks, Fox.”

Fox closed her eyes. “So very welcome…”

Anna got up off the bed and made her way over to the door. “Here, you need to rest. You need anything?”

“Can… can you bring the radio in? Wanna listen to that show they do from Tedeslar.”

Anna smiled. “Alright. And… well... Fox?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you, really. For listening.”

“Sure.”

Anna left quietly to get the small, beat-up radio. Coming back in, she set it on the table, turned the volume up so it was quiet but clearly audible, and left before she realized that Fox had already fallen asleep.


	10. Arrangements

The days passed slowly and quietly. Almost miraculously, Fox managed to not develop an infection, and neither did the prisoner, despite the reduced meals and rudimentary levels of sanitation. Skye managed to progress through her lessons in medicine, construction, and tailoring, and was starting to prove herself an asset to the tiny settlement. Sab found himself occupied with the herculean task of preparing defensive fortifications around the base. Anna was trying her best to manage the colony’s few resources, not sure if she should be taking Skye’s seemingly shrinking clothes as a good or bad sign. All in all, the four found themselves so preoccupied with their tasks that they almost didn’t notice when the snow began to recede.

Per Fox’s suggestion, the prisoner was made to mend clothes for the upcoming season, but when it became apparent that the colony’s few spare clothing items were too beaten and worn to be fixed, Sab had him pull the seams out so the fabric could be salvaged instead. The prisoner did this begrudgingly at first, but eventually seemed to tolerate having a simple task to keep boredom at bay.

The slush on the ground was ankle-deep and muddy when Anna dragged the prisoner outside and let him free, watching him hobble away on his newly-healed leg and breathing a sigh of relief when he passed over the horizon line. She could almost feel her ribs under her palm.

Fox, embarrassed at having been a burden to the others, grabbed Sab's rifle as soon as she could get out of bed without Anna protesting and roamed the forests and plains around the base, keeping the small stone structure close to the horizon as she made large circuits in search of game. 

On a clear night at the very end of winter, on the day Fox first spotted the tiny blades of grass shooting up between the remaining patches of snow, the three adults crammed into Anna’s room to make a radio call to Erika Belsaas.

“You sure you know how to do this?” Fox asked, watching Anna fiddle with the knobs. 

“I think so… They broadcast the show on channel 7, but they use channel 9 for official communication, right?”

“Yeah, though the Night Raven camp sometimes also uses channel 9, so make sure none of them are on there before you start talking.”

Anna navigated over to channel 9, waited for a few seconds to make sure she heard nobody else on the channel, and then pushed the button to speak.

“This is Anna Hinton with a message for Erika Belsaas of Tedeslar. I repeat, this is Anna Hinton with a message for Erika Belsaas of Tedeslar. Please respond.”

There was silence for a few moments before the machine began to crackle with voices from the other end.

“Responding to Anna Hinton. This is Sarah Westley of Tedeslar. Erika Belsaas will speak to you momentarily. Please move to channel 3. Repeat, move to channel 3.”

Anna pushed the button to respond. “Understood. Thank you, Sarah.”

“You’re welcome.”

Turning to dials to channel 3, the trio found themselves waiting for what seemed like an excessive period of time.

“You think maybe… she got busy?” Fox asked the others. Sab shrugged.

“Maybe she’s asleep?” Anna questioned. “I mean, it is kinda late…”

“It’s not even late for Skye. She was protesting when I told her to go to bed,” Fox replied.

“She never wants to go to bed, Fox.” Anna shook her head as Sab smiled.

Fox laughed. “You’re right about that one.”

The radio crackled and fuzzed back to life. “This is Erika Belsaas of Tedeslar, responding to a call from Anna Hinton. Please respond.”

“This is she.”

“Oh thank goodness.” The woman at the other end chuckled nervously. “I apologize for the delay. I have been researching advanced radio functions, and I was trying to create a secure channel.”

“Did you succeed?” Anna asked.

Erika must have been fiddling with the controls at the other end, because her signal cut out before getting much clearer. “I am not su-…. We …. -ave to see about that.”

Anna looked at the other two with a confused expression. Fox shook her head and shrugged her shoulders back before gesturing back to the radio.

“Alright. I should probably let you know I have Fox and Sab here with me.”

“Hello,” Sab responded politely.

“‘Sup,” Fox replied.

“Well then, greetings from Tedeslar to all three of you! What is it you wanted to tell me?”

Anna hesitated. “We have… a bit of a dilemma. Well, more like, a favor to ask you.”

“Yes? Please explain.”

Anna bit her lip. Fox seized the radio and pushed the button. “It’s about Skye. We’ve had a super crappy winter, and we’re worried about being able to take care of the child.”

“We have been trying our best to take care of her, but the most recent raid was… devastating,” Sab added. “We have not had the resources to cover her needs. What we ask is…”

“Can she live with you, in Tedeslar, just for a little while, so we can get back on our feet and make this a safer place for her to live?” Anna finished.

Erika paused. “I mean, it is not an unreasonable request. If it was just me, I would take her as soon as we can get our first crops in the ground. However, by tradition, I must hold a town council. I can hold one tomorrow, if you would like, and get back to you tomorrow evening. Is that alright?”

“Yeah, that’s perfect,” Anna replied, voice trembling slightly. “We’ll be waiting for you tomorrow on this channel then?”

“Yes. Channel three.”

“Okay, thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Erika Belsaas, signing off.”

The three sat there for a while in silence. Sab quietly took control of the radio and changed the dials back to the local emergency channel, which was silent for now.

“I guess… I just don’t want to see her go,” Anna said quietly, a single tear running down her face. She quickly wiped it off with the sleeve of her shirt.

“None of us do,” Sab replied as Fox put her arm around Anna’s shoulder, “but she will be safer there.”

“And it’s not for forever. She’ll probably be back before winter next year,” Fox added.

Anna nodded, wiping her face one more time before straightening up and taking the radio out of the room.

“When do you think we should tell her?” Sab asked after a minute.

“Skye?” Fox shrugged. “I mean, we don’t even know if Tedeslar’s gonna go for it.” She got up, pulling her revolver off her hip and spinning it on her finger. 

“That is true, though, we will need to tell her at some time.” Sab unclasped and reclasped his hands. “Actually, there is something I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, with the pirates being close by, I was thinking that maybe we should teach Skye how to defend herself.”

“Huh.” Fox turned to Sab. “To be completely honest, I’m kinda embarrassed I didn’t think of that. What were you thinkin’ of teaching her?”

Sab shrugged. “Something simple, basic knife skills maybe, or how to get out of a hold. How to escape, how to hide…”

“Hm… Why are you asking me though? Why’d you wait for Anna to leave?”

“She seemed upset.”

Fox looked at the door. “Yeah, you’re right… good call.”

“But you agree, yes? If you’re too busy, I can do it myself…”

Fox smiled. “No, yeah, I think it’s great. Fantastic actually, like… this is gonna be fun.” She flipped her gun into the air, where it twirled for a minute before Fox caught it again on her finger and smoothly re-holstered it at her hip. “You wanna start tomorrow, after hunting?”

“Yes. I have a knife picked out, actually.” Sab pulled a small bundle of cloth out of his pocket and handed it to Fox. Unfolding the fabric, she found a small knife, the blade a little longer than half the length of her hand and bearing the unmistakable blue-grey tint of plassteel. The smooth plastic handle was neatly scored and then bound with a thick sinew string. 

“This the knife we had in the emergency survival kit when we crashed?”

Sab nodded. “I did the scoring myself. I thought it would make it easier for her to grip the handle. I am also working on a leather sheath, but it is not quite done yet.”

“This is great, Sab,” Fox complimented absent-mindedly, turning the knife over and over and admiring Sab’s modifications. “Did you sand the handle down too?”

“I figured she would need a thinner handle, because her hands are still small. When she gets older and her hands get bigger, I thought I could wrap it in a leather grip.”

Fox kept examining the knife, taking a close look at the sanding on the edge of the handle. “Dang, Sab, this is so cool. Perfect, really. Though, I feel like she shouldn’t practice with the real thing until she gets the basics down.”

“I agree. We do have some stone knives in the storeroom that are about the weight of this one, but very dull. She can pick one of those tomorrow.”

“Sounds good.” Fox wrapped the blade back up gently and passed it back to Sab before making her way to the door.

“Oh, Fox?”

She turned in the doorway. “Yeah?”

“Could you not tell Skye about the knife? I want it to be a gift, for when she leaves.”

Fox nodded, her smile dropping a bit. “Sure, yeah.”

“Thank you.”

She turned to leave. “No problem, Sab.”

\-----

Skye wandered into the kitchen in the morning and was greeted with a bowl of fresh berries and the image of Anna bent over a large sheet with a black stick. She sat down in front of the bowl and started eating without the doctor looking up.

“What’s that?” Skye asked around a particularly juicy berry after about a minute or two. Little flecks of berry juice landed on the table as she talked, somehow evading Anna’s notice.

“This is… a plan,” Anna said slowly, making marks on the sheet with the stick. “I had Sab make these for me so I could plan out our planting this year.”

Skye sat up tall in her chair to get a better view of the sheet. She had no idea what it was made of - something pulpy and fibrous. It was stiff enough to not move when Anna marked it with all sorts of squiggles that Skye couldn’t decipher. The stick, on the other hand, looked like a normal stick except for its dark color, and the fact that it made smudges on the paper and all over Anna’s hand.

The center of the sheet was dominated with a picture of some sort. There was a large mass in the center, with crude corners jutting out of it at right angles. To the left of the mass were two curved lines, following each other from the top of the paper to the bottom. All around the mass and bordering the two curved lines were large boxes, drawn in solid and dashed lines, with symbols inside. It took a quick minute for Skye to figure out that Anna had made an overhead map, with the large mass representing the base underneath the stony hill and the two curved lines representing the river. The large boxes must be fields.

To the right of the map, Anna was now drawing a large box with a bunch of smaller boxes inside. These smaller boxes were filled with some of the same squiggles and symbols that Anna had used to label the fields on the map.

“What’s that?” Skye asked, pointing at the large box.

“It’s a chart,” Anna explained, though this explanation didn’t help at all.

“What does a chart… do?”

“Oh, right, I guess you wouldn’t have learned…” She looked up from her plans to find the girl hovering over the sheet, purple berry juice staining her lips. 

“I’m sorry if I was ignoring you,” Anna apologized, putting the stick down and moving to bring Skye a cup of milk. She put the cup on the table in front of Skye, who drank it eagerly. “This chart helps me figure out how much we need to plant this spring in order to feed everyone and have enough for winter next year. I’m trying to plan it out so we can feed extra people if we need to…”

“So that’s what all those squiggles mean?” Skye asked, having traded in her purple lips for a milk mustache.

“These are my calculations, yeah. How many pounds of food a person needs per day, on average, how much different crops yield per unit area of cropland, how long the crops take to grow, stuff like that. Sab helped a bit with the plant information - it seems he knows a whole lot about farming for someone who never helps with the harvest.” Anna laughed a little to herself. “You know, on my home planet, we had computers that could do all this math for us. You could draw a sheet up like this and have the machine run the numbers for you…”

“Computers?”

“Your colony didn’t have a computer?”

Skye shook her head.

“I didn’t realize, I’m sorry… Well, a computer is a machine, kind of like the radio, with this large screen on it. And the screen is made of tiny lights, and they can make pictures and charts like the one I made on this sheet. It can do math too, all sorts of math - taxes, scheduling, navigation…”

“Oh, like an AI core?”

“What?”

“I heard some of the adults talking about one, once. It sounded like something that could tell you how to fly around stars and stuff. They were gonna steal it from somebody, or something like that…”

“Wait, who were they going to steal it from?” 

Skye shrugged, looking down at her empty cup. “I don’t remember. It was a long time ago.”

“Oh.” Anna seemed disappointed. “Well, that’s alright.”

Skye was quiet for a minute as Anna went back to her work, writing squiggles in the little boxes and counting to herself.

“Can I learn how to do that?” Skye asked. 

Anna had a funny look on her face. “You… you might. We’ll see.”

“Okay.” Skye looked back down at her cup, running her finger around the rim.

Anna sighed. “How about you go see if Fox has anything for you to do? I think she wanted to show you something,” she said, not looking up from the chart.

“Sure,” Skye replied halfheartedly, leaving her cup and bowl on the table and running back to her room to find her parka.

She found Fox outside with Sab, halfway between the west door and the river, twirling little stone knives between her fingers. She stopped as Skye approached.

“Here she is, little sleepyhead!” Fox announced in a gallant manner, sheathing the knives into her belt. “Do you know what we wanted you out here for?”

Skye shook her head. Sab came a bit closer, leaning down a bit to Skye’s level. “Fox and I have decided that you should know some basic self defense.”

“Do I get to use one of those knives?” Skye asked, pointing to the dull blades in Fox’s belt.

“Not yet, but soon.” Sab answered. “We thought we might teach you some evasive moves without the blades first.”

“Now, to start, whenever there’s a raid, or some other emergency, we need you to listen to us first,” Fox said, motioning to herself and Sab. “Anna too. If we tell you to run, you need to run. If we tell you to stay put, you need to stay put.”

Skye looked down at the mushy ground. “Okay.”

“We want you to be safe, Skye,” Sab offered. “But we understand that you might be scared, and that is alright.”

Fox put her hand on Skye’s shoulder. “Here, actually, how bout we play a game? That might be fun…” She looked to Sab. “You ever play Hide and Seek on your home planet?”

He gave her a confused look. “We might have, but we probably had another name. Explain the rules.”

“They’re pretty simple, actually. There’s one person who’s going to hide, and the rest of the kids have to count to twenty, with their eyes closed. Once they finish counting, they have to search for the person who hid, and the person that finds the hider wins.”

Sab scrunched his eyebrows. “We played something similar, but we only had one counter, and all the rest-”

“Well, in real life, there’s more than one raider, isn’t there? And that’s what the counters represent - pirates and raiders.”

“...Um… alright.” Sab shrugged. 

“So,” Fox turned to Skye. “We’re gonna be the counters - the raiders - and you’re going to hide from us. The longer it takes for us to find you, the better, okay? So pick somewhere good.”

Skye nodded, and started to run off into the treeline as Fox and Sab began to count.

“... Nineteen… twenty.” Sab finished, and he and Fox looked up and scanned the landscape.

“Back on my home planet, the last person to be found won the game, you see.” Sab said quietly. “The person searching didn’t really win - they just got to start searching because they won the last game.”

“Huh. We never did it like that. Back home, the hider almost never won. I guess they only got to win if the game somehow stopped before they were found, but that was really rare.”

“Hm.” Sab was quiet for a second as the two started to head for the trees. “Where was your home planet, if I may ask?”

“Lovely little heap of crap called Cordaie. Urbworld, if you couldn’t figure. Sector 3, quadrant B, though really close to the edge of A.” Fox looked into a bush, found nothing, and continued walking. 

“When did you leave?” Sab peered behind a rock, scaring the squirrel that was there.

“They froze me in the summer of 5213, intragalactic time, but when I read the ship’s manifest later, I found out that criminal activity had stalled the departure of the ship by a handful of years.” Fox shook her head. “Doesn’t really matter now, but still…” The two reached the river, and Fox peered across to the other side. Finding no footprints, she led Sab downstream towards the fields.

“What about you? You never really told us much about your home planet…” Fox offered after a while, sweeping her eyes across the bare fields and realizing that Skye wouldn’t have been able to hide there with no plant cover.

“I guess you could call my home a midworld, but we really had no industry. Just farmers, all across the planet. We grew many crops, mostly for export. The planet was called Jard, and it was also in Sector 3, though we were further out - quadrant C, I suspect.”

“Why’d ya leave?” Fox asked as the two began to circle round the southern side of the base. Sab began looking behind some of the new sandbags that he had made, but Skye made no appearance.

“We were peacefully unified under a planetary government, but we were not part of any multi-planetary organizations. Eventually, though, we became attractive in the eyes of a local empire, and their negotiations for control of the planet were not… were not going well.”

“They wanted to take you over? Which empire?”

Sab waved his hand, dismissing the questions. “It does not matter which empire. What matters is that I was sent away - some humanitarian organization got concerned about an upcoming conflict and offered to take the planet’s children and bring them to safety. I was frozen, but something happened between takeoff and our arrival. Our ship was boarded, or something like that. I ended up on a trader ship for a while, fixing things as they broke down, and eventually ended up with enough money to hold my own for a while on another agricultural planet. It was not the same as my home, though, and after a while I saved up to be frozen again, and paid for passage to a planet with more cities and less farms…”

“And then you crashed here?”

Sab nodded. “Yes.”

Fox smiled a little. “So, what you’re telling me is… you’ve spent your entire life trying to avoid farming, and ended up on a rimworld with two broke women and no other way to feed yourself but to…”

“But to farm? Yeah,” Sab laughed a little, “I guess you could say that.”

Fox cracked up. “Dang, man, that’s… kinda funny, not gonna lie.” She took in a breath, trying to calm down her laughter a bit. “Either we totally suck, or Skye is really good at this.”

“I mean, we have not focused too hard on finding her.”

“True, true. How ‘bout we split up?”

Sab nodded his agreement, and the two headed separate ways. Fox trekked towards the eastern side of the base, looking around Sab’s new sandbags and inside the berry bushes that were just starting to produce fruit. Sab headed south, into the trees, taking a wider circuit around the settlement. They searched for almost three quarters of an hour before meeting back up at the entrance of the base.

“You have any luck?” Fox asked. Sab shook his head.

“To be honest, I’m getting a little worried. I went around the entire base twice.”

“Do you think she might be inside?”

Fox glanced at the door. “Might as well check before freaking out…”

The two made their way inside. Anna was rinsing berries in a bowl at the table while looking over her final plans. 

“You seen Skye?” Fox asked, her words a little rushed.

Anna didn’t look up. “I thought she was with you?”

“Well, yeah, she was, but then…”

Anna sighed, looking up to see Fox’s expression. “But then what?”

“Fox offered to let her play a hiding game. It appears she is winning,” Sab said.

“Well, you can check in here, but she hasn’t come through that door since I’ve been in here,” Anna replied, pointing to the east entrance through which the two had come.

Fox nodded, running off down the hall to check each room. Anna turned to Sab. “You’re not going to look with her?”

Sab shook his head. “Skye is better at this than we realize. Fox and I found no threats when we circled the base. I have faith that she is beating us at our own game.”

“Well, if you’re that confident…” Anna turned back to her work. “To be honest, I was hoping Fox would be better than to lose a child.”

“She has not lost her, just underestimated her.” 

Anna nodded, and Sab retreated to his tailoring bench to work on a project.

\----

Fox had peered into every room in the base, and still hadn’t found Skye. It was now noon.

She crept back into her room, flopping backwards onto her bed. Just as she hit the mattress, a soft shriek emanated from underneath, causing Fox to jump off the bed and reflexively reach for her revolver. She slowly lifted the mattress, coming face to face with Skye’s chocolate brown eyes and dark, frizzy hair that was sticking to the bottom of the mattress.

Skye started to laugh, sliding out from between the mattress and the supporting slats. Fox had no words - she wasn’t sure whether or not to congratulate Skye on her skills of evasion or tell her off for… well, she couldn’t really think of anything Skye deserved to be told off for. Nobody had told her she couldn’t hide inside.

Skye, meanwhile, looked proud, bearing a wide smirk and puffing her chest out slightly. “Do I win?”

“... Yes.” Fox said after a second.

“Can I learn to use the knife now?”

Fox scratched the back of her neck, embarrassed. “We’ve spent… a lot more time than I figured playing Hide and Seek…” She looked back at the mattress, now askew in its wood frame. “How did you… I didn’t hear the door open when I was counting…”

Skye shook her head, smiling wryly. 

“Okay then… Why don’t ya go see if Anna needs you to do anything?”

Skye bounced off towards the kitchen, ecstatic at seeming to have beaten Fox at her own game. Fox stood, watching her go, before straightening her mattress and sitting back on her bed. She fell onto her back, arms outstretched across Sab’s homemade wool blanket. Why was this bothering her so much? Skye was an excellent hider - something that would no doubt come in handy sooner or later. And Fox really hadn’t been trying her best to find her until she panicked. She should be proud of Skye for taking advantage of her lack of attention.

Fox felt… small. Not that she had been bested by a twelve year old - come to think of it, Fox wasn’t entirely sure how old Skye was in the first place. It felt more like… like Fox couldn’t put it into words, not even in her own head. 

Fox tried to remember what she had been like at twelve. Memories flew at her in snatches - squealing in delight as she ran through down countless twisted alleyways with the neighborhood children, nicking rations from vendors in the crowded market districts, her mother coming home from work late at night to laugh tiredly at the state of her hair. A little twinge of pain shot through Fox’s heart - she’d give anything to have her mother make fun of her disheveled appearance now.

Maybe Fox was hoping that Skye didn’t have the childhood that she’d had, but she knew deep down that it was unlikely. She was unable to shake the feeling that Skye had learned to hide out of necessity, and weighed on her like a stone that she knew she had been carrying for a while. 

“Well, at least, she might have a better chance, in Tedeslar…” a voice whispered from the recesses of her mind. Fox hated the thought, but she had to admit that it did have a point. Skye would finally have a stable environment, assuming Erika could pull the strings she said she would. It’d be better for her…

Fox got up, sighing, and tried to resign herself to this fact. It wouldn’t be for forever, of course. She’d be back… and she’d just have to make sure the colony was ready for her when she did.

\-----

Skye lay awake in bed, unable to sleep. Maybe it was the addition of the first berries of the spring to her diet, or maybe it was still the lingering pride at having won Fox’s game that morning, but her mind seemed unwilling to quiet either way. Her thoughts drifted this way and that, landing briefly on one subject before skipping off to another, like a butterfly fluttering from one flower to another.

She thought about her chores that afternoon, where she helped Anna gather the berries that cropped up after the snow receded. Anna had seemed delighted at how many they had been able to find, and didn’t seem to mind that Skye ate more than her fill while picking them. Skye hoped she could have some tomorrow for breakfast again, her mouth watering at the memory of the tart juice on her tongue.

Her thoughts then drifted to Anna’s chart, and she realized that she’d probably have to help Anna plant all those extra crops in the coming weeks, once the soil softened up a little more. This realization didn’t excite her as much as the berries had, thought it seemed to give Anna a lot of comfort.

She then thought about how after dinner (Fox had managed to find a rabbit, and Anna had roasted it on a spit until the juices were dripping off) the three adults had made a big deal out of being tired, shoving her off to bed early. Fox had mentioned that maybe, if Skye got enough rest, that she’d let her use the stone knives tomorrow, a prospect that made Skye less tired. On the contrary, she shook with excitement, and she couldn’t wait to start learning with Fox.

She sat up in bed. Maybe… maybe it wouldn't hurt to get a head start, she thought to herself. What if she practiced a little bit now, and then tomorrow she could impress Fox with all she knew how to do already… 

“I mean, it’s not like I can sleep anyways,” she said aloud. The more she thought about it, the more she was convinced that the adults would be proud of her if she tried to start early, somehow overlooking the fact that she had no idea how to use a knife, much less anticipate what Fox would have her do the next day. Maybe, she could figure out how to twirl them on her fingertips, or throw them at targets on the walls. She’d have to make a target, though…

She got up out of bed, slipping on her wool socks and tiptoeing to the door. She opened it just a crack, and not seeing anyone in the hallway, she silently crept out of her room and towards the storeroom.

As she passed Anna’s room, she heard the muffled voices of Sab, Anna, and Fox through the door. She stopped, making no noise. They were supposed to be tired, too tired to keep working after dinner…

She stepped closer and put her ear up to the door. She was greeted with a fuzzy voice from over the radio, and Anna’s replies.

“... in a week or two maybe, we’re still… -nowed in, ground is frozen. But once we put… in the grou-... -ing her over.”

There was a pause. Skye pressed her ear closer to the door, willing herself not to make any noise.

“She’ll be able to get an education, right?” Anna asked from the other side of the door. 

“Of course,” the woman on the radio replied. “She might be behind the rest of the students, but I am sure she can catch up quickly. The schoolchildren have their classes in the mornings, and their chores in the afternoons. I have told the others that she is a capable child. She can assist the adults in their work, yes?”

“As long as you don’t tell her to go to bed too early, she’ll cooperate,” Fox laughed.

The woman on the radio chuckled as well. “How long do you expect you will want her to stay?”

“...Perhaps until the fall. We need… to ensure a stable enough environment...for her safety,” Anna replied haltingly.

“Anna means to say that we feel irresponsible for keeping her here when she is so young,” Sab explained calmly. “We’ve had some close calls.”

“I see. Well, we can definitely keep her until the fall, and later if the community finds her helpful. I want to ensure that you, as our neighbors, get through this rough patch safely.”

“Thank you, Erika,” Anna said after a minute. “We’ll keep in touch.”

Skye pulled away from the door, unsure how to feel. Were they really sending her away to Tedeslar? Memories of Jenna and Taki came to her mind, sudden and sour. How could they send her away? She wanted nothing more to slam open the door and demand answers from the adults, but years of experience told her to head back to her room before she was found out. The girl begrudgingly tiptoed back to her room and silently shut the door.

She flopped onto the bed, her feet on her pillow and her arms stretched wide. She wasn’t sure whether to feel angry or sad. She liked Fox, and Anna, and Sab, and she thought they all liked her too… She clenched her fists, trying not to cry. 

“I don’t want to leave,” Skye whispered to the ceiling. How could they? She curled up on her side on top of her blanket. She wasn’t that young, certainly, not too young to be sent away and babysat… She hadn’t been too young to leave her home colony… or maybe, maybe she had been…

A tear dripped down the side of her face, over the bridge of her nose and past the other eye before it met her bed. Was there any way to make them change their minds?

“We feel irresponsible for keeping her here when she is so young.” Sab’s words echoed over and over. Irresponsible how? She had been kept safe… though even Skye couldn’t delude herself when she considered what Anna probably meant by “close calls.”

Skye felt yet another twang of embarrassment. Maybe, if she had been less scared, and listened to Fox and Anna and Sab…

Skye pulled the blanket over her body, cocooning herself against the chilled night air, pulling her legs closer, trying to make her body as small as she felt.


	11. Circling Back

_"C’mon! I have something to show you!” Sam whispered, dragging Skye behind her with a sweaty hand. She ran past the clutch of solar panels and towards the outer wall, her loose plait swinging back and forth behind her. Being younger and shorter, Skye panted and huffed in an attempt to keep up._

_They stopped abruptly behind a storage building that abutted on the wall. Sam turned, holding her finger against her lips, before peering around the corner. Skye knew better than to take a look herself. Sam was better at these things._

_“Alright, coast is clear, follow me.”_

_Skye obediently tailed Sam as she skirted the storage building and the edge of the wall, coming to a small door nested into the stone where the laid blocks met the side of the canyon. Sam grabbed the door by its metal-barred window and yanked with all her strength until it creaked open, creating a crevice just wide enough for the girls to slip through._

_“You’re sure they won’t notice we’re gone?” Skye asked haltingly as she followed Sam down the short passageway carved into the rock._

_“We’ll be fine,” Sam replied, yanking open the second door at the end of the path, which was painted orange to blend into the stone. “The guards are engaged in a game, so they won’t notice a thing.”_

_Skye nodded nervously, shielding her eyes from the sunlight as she left the dark passageway. Sam offered her hand, and she took it, tailing the older girl through the maze of towering rock formations. The sparse vegetation grew out of various crevices in the stone, producing a strange sort of forest, more red and orange than green._

_“We’re almost there,” Sam reassured her charge, leading Skye under an archway and down a shallow slope into a circular hollow in the rock, with walls tall enough to block out the sun at this point in the afternoon. Around the edges, various plants grew - succulents and hardy grasses and small, twiggy bushes. In the very center of this hollow, a tiny cactus had taken root, hardly taller than six inches._

_And it had a flower, the most exquisite flower that Skye had ever seen. It had long, limber petals of bright magenta, contrasting severely with the waxy green cactus and the dusty red dirt. The sight of it took her breath away._

_“I found it while looking for agave the other day,” Sam explained after several quiet moments. “It kinda took me by surprise when I found it. Didn’t expect anything pretty to grow out here, but I guess I was wrong.”_

_Skye nodded, gently brushing the tips of the petals with her fingertips. She was scared to ruin it, this tiny plant that seemed to be unafraid to stand out and be seen._

\-----

Skye awoke with a jolt, sitting straight up in her bed, the covers damp with sweat. Fragments of the dream swirled through her head as her eyes adjusted to the early morning light filtering through the slit high in the stone wall. 

Sam… Skye felt like she could cry. She realized that she didn’t know where Sam was, or even if she was still alive. Her stomach felt cold at this thought, and the prospect seemed almost unbelievable. She sat there for a few minutes, immobile. How long had it been since Sam had been taken away? Two years? Three?

She really didn’t want to pull the long, lonely summers without Sam out of her memory, but thoughts trickled in nonetheless: eating alone, working alone, waiting alone in the tunnels during the raids with her knees drawn up to her chest, wondering what might happen if she were taken away too… 

And then she remembered, suddenly, that she was being taken away. And there was nothing she could do about it. Skye found herself wishing Sam were here. She’d know what to do.

Of course, Sam wouldn't have ever been sent away for being too weak. Sam was strong, and capable… not like Skye, who ran and hid at the sound of a gunshot. She winced at the memory of the raid in the snow. Anna, Fox, and Sab certainly didn’t need someone that incompetent around, someone that got other people hurt. No wonder they wanted to send her away. 

The thought almost sent her crawling back under the covers, but as she lifted her scratchy muffalo-wool blanket, an idea came to her - what if she could prove them wrong?

The question, of course, was how. Skye wracked her brain for a few minutes, but came up with no good ideas. With a sigh, she decided that she might as well prove herself not lazy, and laced up her boots before creeping into the kitchen. Fortunately, nobody was up yet, so no one was there to admonish Skye as she made her way over to the stove.

Breakfast! That would be useful - and if she could be helpful enough to Anna, who always seemed to go around with dark circles under her eyes, she might just decide that Skye was too good to let go. Besides, an adult would need to know how to cook for herself. Might as well learn now.

Skye pulled one of Fox’s stone training knives out of the storage room, where she’d seen her return them yesterday after their game lasted much longer than intended. She was planning to make home fries - how hard could that be, really?

Dragging a half-full sack of potatoes over to the table, Skye tried her best to skin the tubers like Anna did, but ended up with heavily butchered shards of potato. She frowned, not happy with her work, but decided to go ahead with frying them anyways.

She loaded a log into the belly of the stove, and used Sab’s little flint lighter to catch the log on fire. It took a few tries, but eventually the wood was smoldering, and the stovetop was radiating heat. Time for the fries.

Skye loaded the chunks of potato into Anna’s only skillet and plunked the whole affair onto the stove. After about a minute, Skye realized that she usually saw Anna push the potatoes around with the spatula. Looking around hurriedly, she found the wooden utensil perched high up on a shelf with the bowls and plates. She jumped up to grab it, finally capturing the spatula on her third try, but only after knocking the stack of bowls to the floor. Shoot.

Skye picked the bowls up off the dusty floor and placed them on the table. Not being tall enough to place them back on the shelf, she decided to use them to serve up the potatoes once they were done.

But after another few minutes, Skye knew something was wrong. The fries weren’t browning like they were supposed to, and to make matters worse, they were beginning to stick to the pan. Skye groaned. Did she need more heat? Maybe that was why the potatoes were looking so raw.

Heading back to the storeroom, Skye dragged out a series of logs and loaded them one-by-one into the belly of the stove until they would no longer fit. Closing the stove hatch, she turned back to her potatoes. After a few more minutes, they were looking darker, but they stuck to the pan - and each other - even more.

“Ahh!” Skye shrieked aloud before remembering that she was trying to not wake the whole base. What was wrong now? Certainly, there was enough heat, as the girl had started to sweat from head to toe. Skye struggled to remember what Anna did when she made fries. Was there something she forgot to add?

And then she remembered - butter. Skye smacked her forehead. She should have added butter at the very beginning, but maybe she could sneak it in now. She left her pan on the stove as she ran back to the storeroom once again. She shoved her way past the bags of potatoes saved from last fall and the small bags of rice that Fox managed to coax from the soil after the ground thawed. Where would Anna keep her butter? Skye made a wide berth around the stacks of butchered raw meat and animal skins, almost tripping on a stray bone from who-knows-what. As she made her way to the back of the room, she caught a whiff of something acrid… 

Smoke. A shiver ran through Skye as she heard the familiar trio of voices grow louder and louder, with Anna’s shrieks mixing with Fox’s expletives. Panicking, Skye dove underneath the pile of skins, trying to ignore the odor emanating off the pelts in waves.

She could just barely make out the voices through the fur, though she caught her name several times. She felt frozen, becoming increasingly convinced that if she moved a single muscle, she’d be done for. They'd never punished her severely, she realized, but she had never done anything this dangerous either…

Why did she have to try cooking, anyways? What a stupid idea. If any of them had been on the fence about sending her away, they certainly weren’t now. The faces and voices of Jenna and Taki came back out of her memory, taunting her. She could almost feel their presence, and loathed it. Certainly nothing could be worse than having to live with them, even if she did get to learn about tables or whatever. But that would be set in stone now, she guessed.

Unless… No, she couldn’t. She’d never make it, not on her own. But the alternative…

\-----

She had been walking for what felt like hours, the sun mostly hidden behind the trees and clouds. The skin bag, hoisted over one shoulder, felt heavier than when she packed it back in the storeroom. Her stomach grumbled loudly, and she finally allowed herself to stop. Setting her pack down on a dry rock, Skye examined her rations.

Following her fiasco with the potatoes, she only packed a few of those, along with several fistfuls of rice and some chunks of raw meat, wrapped in shreds of Fox’s old parka. Hands trembling, she pulled the lighter out of the bottom of the pack, fingering it carefully, before realizing she needed something to burn first.

Skye combed the woods for loose wood, and managed to find some dried-out, dead shrubs to use as fuel. With utmost care, she clicked the flint-and-steel lighter several times, until the sparks caught, and the bushes started to smoke. Within a few minutes, a small fire was blooming at the base of the bush, and the branches started to blacken and fall into the growing blaze.

Skye smiled. This wasn’t so bad, she thought, spearing a chunk of meat with a twig and holding it over the fire to roast. The birds twittered overhead, crossing between trees, gently rustling the new green buds. Sunbeams drifted through the canopy, settling onto the grassy forest floor in a dappled carpet. Sticking her cooking spear in the dirt near the fire, Skye put her hands behind her head and leaned back onto the new grass, almost not noticing as her back squelched into the mud under the sparse greenery.

She could do this. She closed her eyes, letting herself slide halfway into sleep, the sunrays dancing across her eyelids, a painting with watercolor reds and browns. She could do this… she could be fine…

With little more than a sigh, she slid completely under, into the depths of sleep.

\-----

She awoke abruptly into a much darker world, bits of a fading dream breaking off and drifting into the breeze. The temperature had plummeted, and the sun was no longer visible above the canopy. Immediately regretting not packing a jacket, Skye slowly pulled herself out of the muddy grass to find two things: One, her fire was out, and two, there was a large, brown bear, nosing and pawing through her supplies.

Without thinking, she shrieked, instantly cursing the decision as the bear turned its giant head to face her. Hastily scrambling off of the ground, Skye turned and bolted in a random direction, not daring to turn around to see if the bear was chasing her. She ran for what felt like an hour, imagining the bear’s feet pounding into the mud behind her, its breath hot on her neck. She slipped once or twice, scrabbling at the ground or in the bushes around her, anything to push her back up, to get moving, to escape.

Twisting, turning through the dark woods, the little sense of perception she had was lost as soon as the sun sank below the horizon, somewhere millions of miles behind her back. The branches she was able to avoid minutes before began to hit her in the face and torso, and roots that she would have been able to see during the day found themselves just beyond her toes, tripping her up and sending her sprawling forward onto her face. It took the will and adrenaline flowing through every fiber in her body to push her onwards, towards… well, she didn’t know at this point. Towards something better than this present moment.

Eventually, her running became stumbling, and her stumbling became trudging, until exhaustion pulled her to the ground, panting and coughing and choking on the air as her legs became inexplicably cold and wet. Confused, she finally looked up, and by the light of the crescent moon, found herself on the banks of the river. Her eyes focused, and several small campfires came into view, in a clearing a long way downstream.

Home. She knew it, somehow, as she started splashing her way down the river. The thoughts of nomadic tribes, or pirate outposts, or wandering traders never entered her mind. Those fires were set for her. She knew it.

\-----

It didn’t occur to Skye that she would most definitely be punished for her behavior until after she knocked on the door. She wasn’t quite sure why she knocked either, until she tested the door and realized that it was locked anyways.

Anna’s voice, cracked and scratchy, came through the wooden slats. “Who’s there?”

Skye hesitated. She had been so sure that she’d arrive back at the base, but now…

“Who’s there?” Anna repeated a little louder, opening the door a crack. Upon seeing Skye, there, dripping wet and covered in mud and scratched by numerous branches, her eyes grew wide. She flung open the door, and Skye found herself scooped up, nestled close to the woman’s chest.

“Oh, my baby, my baby girl…” It was like the first raid, when Anna hid her away in the bedroom. Skye felt Anna’s hands on her head as she stroked her scraggly, tangled hair, and she felt herself breaking down. She screwed up her face, willing herself not to cry as she felt Anna’s tears hot on her neck. Why did she feel… sorry?

It all seemed so odd, when Anna finally set her back down on her feet. Skye waited for admonition to come, but it never came, not as Anna gently peeled off her jacket and sat her down in front of the fire. The girl sat quietly, wanting to apologize profusely before any punishment came but at the same time too tired and confused to say anything.

Anna disappeared into the storeroom, reappearing moments later with her mortar and pestle and a bowl of water. She began to wipe Skye’s face clean of dirt with a clean rag she pulled from her pocket.

“We were worried sick, Skye,” Anna said finally, a note of sadness in her voice. “Fox and Sab are still out there looking for you. If you were worried about what happened at breakfast…”

All of a sudden, the events of that morning came back to her, almost as if they had happened years ago. How could she have been so stupid as to have come back? The incident with the potatoes seemed miniscule compared to running away and coming back in the middle of the night. Skye closed her eyes, sighing inwardly at the thought. She’d be lucky if they didn’t send her away right now, just to get rid of her.

“Skye? What is it?” Anna asked. Skye turned away, her hands tugging involuntarily at the hem of her frayed shirt.

“You…” she started, trying to keep her voice from cracking, “you wanted to send me away… to Tedeslar… and I thought maybe… maybe I could prove…” She swallowed back the hard lump in her throat. “...prove I was useful enough to stay.”

“Oh, Skye,” Anna began, sighing, “you heard us, through the door, talking to Erika?” The girl nodded.

Anna put down her rag and took Skye’s hands. “I don’t want to send you away, and I don’t think the others really want to either-”

“Then why are you doing it?! Why can’t I just stay here?!” Skye shouted, already knowing the answer.

Anna shook her head. “It’s just not safe here… You need to be protected, and we’re not sure we can do that very well… You need to be somewhere you can be safe, and learn, and grow…”

“But I don’t want to go! I can survive just fine! I ran from a bear out there-”

“You what?!?”

“I ran from a bear! And I was fine!”

Anna sat down, the wet rag falling to her lap. She put her head in her hands. “I can’t believe we managed to lose you like that… you could have died…”

“But I’m fine! I wasn’t even scared…” Skye bit her lip. That was a lie, of course, but the truth wasn’t going to help her now.

Anna shook her head. “You have to go… Gosh, I didn’t even realize… You ARE going,” she concluded in a resolved tone, re-wetting her rag and continuing to wipe off Skye’s face.

“But Anna,” Skye whined, the desperation dripping from her words, “I just can’t! I can’t go! I don’t want to!”

“Why not?” Anna replied, reaching for her mortar and pestle and dropping in a handful of leaves.

“I… they’re mean! They don’t like me!”

“Who?”

“Jenna and Taki…” Skye folded her arms protectively over her chest. “They hate me because we’re poor and I can’t read.”

“Certainly they don’t hate you,” Anna replied, grinding her herbs under the pestle, “and you’ll learn to read soon enough, when you go…”

“But they’re mean! Why can’t I stay? I can learn how to fight and shoot and all that-”

“Are you serious? You’re too young… you’re too young.”

Skye paused, watching embarrassed as Anna gave her a look that brimmed with concern. The doctor shook her head. “Hold still, this is gonna sting,” she warned as she began to apply her paste to Skye’s gashes.

Skye drew in a sharp breath, squashing the impulse to cry aloud. “Do we really need the paste?” she asked, her voice strained.

Anna gave her a knowing look. She started clearing up her things, stacking the bowls by the stove for cleaning in the morning. She sighed aloud, at a volume barely perceptible. “You know,” she started, her back to Skye as she wrung out her rag, “I didn’t really want you to go either, at first. It’s just…”

Anna was interrupted by a slow pounding on the door. She hurried to unlock it, revealing a very bedraggled-looking Fox and Sab. 

“We couldn’t find-” Fox half-cried before spotting the child sitting by the fire. Without another word, she pushed Anna aside, strode over to Skye, and lifted her up off the chair, hugging her tight.

“Where did you go? Sab and I looked everywhere and oh gosh why did you do that, Skye? That was so stupid, what were you thinking, we thought you had died or gotten taken or-” Fox’s words ran together, her voice rising higher and higher until Sab wrapped his arms around them both in a warm embrace.

“Don’t you ever do something like that again, kay?”

\-----

What followed could only be described as the most awkward dinner Skye had ever had. Anna served fried rice, and even though nobody else said anything, Skye could swear that it tasted slightly burnt. She felt more conspicuous now, pushing rice around her plate despite her hunger, than she did half a year ago when she first joined.

The adults had different reactions after the initial excitement. Anna was stern and teary at the same time, almost as if she wanted to punish and coddle Skye at the same time. Sab was sympathetic, almost to the point of patronizing everyone at the table, as if each member of the colony was a ticking time bomb. And Fox, somehow, was silent, taking long glances at Skye while ignoring anything that Anna and Sab had to say.

After what seemed like many hours had passed, when Sab volunteered to clear away the dishes, the two women crept back off to Anna’s bedroom, with Sab following close behind. They didn’t bother to send Skye to bed early - the atmosphere said it all. Knowing better than to listen in again, Skye pulled the old radio off the shelf and set it on the table. She twirled the dials at random, not trying to land on any particular channel. The radio came out of static into a strange conversation on channel four, involving a foreign language that Skye had only heard snippets of but couldn’t seem to remember where.

After a minute, she changed the channel again, and found Fox’s radio show on channel seven. The episode appeared to be almost over, as the voices of the actors faded out to be replaced by a lone piano outro. Skye spun the dials once more, and ended up on channel five, where she found something most interesting.

“-nce on my travels, I came across this, well, what can only be described as some of the greenest - no, THE greenest - off-worlders in like, the entire history of this planet. I show up with my brother, and no joke, they actually have a PICKET FENCE.”

Laughter erupts from what Skye suddenly realizes is supposed to be an audience, and once again, her memory tugs at her, pulling and pulling until-

\-----

_Sam crouched in the doorway, her almond eyes twinkling in the semi-darkness of the hallway._

_“What is it?” Skye asked, a little too loud._

_Sam shushed her, pointing out into the room, where a gaggle of adults were crowded around the radio, some with beers or joints in hand. Skye could barely hear the voice, crackly through the speakers._

_“One captive we had at our base, oh boy, she was a real trip. You all aren’t gonna believe me when I say this, but she was a veg-e-tar-i-an.”_

_The crowd listening in to the broadcast burst into laughter. Sam stifled a snort, and patted the ground next to her._

_“Sometimes, I like to eavesdrop here when the adults listen to the show. The comedian, he’s from a couple of bases over, and he’s great,” Sam whispered, smiling. “You can come sit, but you have to be quiet, kay?”_

_Skye plopped down onto the ground, cross-legged. She couldn’t quite understand what was so funny, but sitting with Sam was better than being in bed, even though the smoke from whatever the adults were smoking was beginning to make her head feel funny._

_The two sat there in the hallway for the rest of the show, though Skye started falling asleep halfway through. Sam let her lay her head on her lap, and she began to drift off, her tired mind making the words from the program into strange pictures in her head. Not knowing what a vegetarian was, Skye imagined her as a willowy woman with no teeth, with a garish red shirt and piercing green eyes…_

_“-s’all for tonight, folks! Good night, Smoky Lizard Camp, and good night Dabnarium!”_

_“What are you two doing here?”_

_Sam briskly lifted Skye to her feet, rendering her dizzy. She rubbed her eyes sleepily as Sam tried to make up some excuse._

_“We were just… well… she was hungry and we were hoping maybe…”_

_Skye felt a rough hand shove her back off down the corridor. “We don’t dole out midnight snacks to ungrateful brats. Get her back to bed,” she heard a gruff voice say._

_Sam put her arm around Skye’s shoulder. “Yes, Mr. Alanzit,” the older girl droned obediently._

_“That’s Commander Alanzit to you, young lady,” Skye heard him reply. “She better be able to work tomorrow, or I’m holding you personally responsible, Samantha.”_

_Sam sighed under her breath, an expression only audible to Skye. “Sure thing, Commander Alanzit.”_

\-----

“So what is it? Do we punish her or not?” Anna asked to the silent room. “Because at this point, I’m not entirely sure.”

“We’re such terrible parents,” Fox muttered, staring at the ground with her arms crossed.

“Oh gosh… we are parents…” Anna ran her fingers nervously through her hair. “We weren’t prepared for this at all, were we? Have we thought about this at all, really?”

Sab placed a hand on her shoulder. “Let’s calm down, Anna. Take a breath.”

Anna sucked in a deep breath, and then let it out.

“Good. Now, what is it that Skye has done that makes you angry?”

“Oh gee, I wonder,” Fox muttered under her breath. Nobody seemed to notice.

Anna looked down at her hands, which were now in her lap. “She ran off without telling us. She could have gotten hurt, I got so worried…”

“The incident at breakfast didn’t bother you at all?”

“She almost burned down the kitchen,” Fox interjected.

Anna shrugged. “I guess, in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t that big of a deal. I was more upset at her leaving than anything.”

“So,” Sab continued, “what do you want to change?”

“I want her to never do that again! I want to get that through to her head, that she shouldn’t do that. I want to know she isn’t going to be reckless again.”

“Okay, that’s good, thank you Anna.” Sab smiled before turning to Fox. “I know you have something to say, too.”

Fox sunk deeper into her corner, crossing one foot over the other. “It’s nothing, really.”

“No, Fox, you do have something. Your ideas are important too.”

Fox examined her nails. “I just, well, I had this friend back home. She was… reckless, and rash, and… things didn’t turn out great for her.”

“What happened to her?” Anna asked.

Fox winced. “She ended up doing some things that… weren’t terrific. Things that she probably regretted later.”

“Skye reminds you of her?” Sab asked kindly.

Fox nodded, curling her fist into a ball. “I just, at the same time, I don’t wanna be that person that beats her down. That’s… the last person I want to be.” She screwed her eyes shut, trying to keep her eyes from misting.

“Thank you, Fox, that was-”

“Yeah, sure, you’re welcome.” Fox pressed the heel of her hand to her eyes, trying to feign headache or fatigue. “What are your insights, Sab? Got any wisdom in that big old head of yours?”

“I’m just wondering why she ran in the first place.”

The room was quiet for a moment before Anna spoke, in a whisper, “I think she thought we would do something bad to her.”

“What makes you say that?” Sab asked quietly.

Anna shook her head. “She left after she burnt the potatoes. She must have heard us yelling and got scared…”

“But we’ve never punished her before, have we?” Fox piped up from her corner. 

“We never had any reason to.”

“I mean, she’s never done anything like this before, though.”

“I just, it makes me not even want to reprimand her, just cause she seemed so…”

“Terrified?”

Anna sighed. “Yeah.” 

\-----

“- and good night Dabnarium!”

Fox peered into the kitchen to find Skye asleep, her head resting on the grainy tabletop next to the radio. Wordlessly, she scooped the girl into her arms, carrying her past Anna and Sab and into her own bedroom. The two others followed quietly after Sab shut off the radio, not making any comments about the broadcast that had just finished.

Fox laid Skye gently on her bed, and Anna pulled the wool blanket over her body. “I guess we discuss it with her in the morning?” Anna whispered as she tucked the covers up under Skye’s chin.

“Yeah,” Fox whispered back, and Sab nodded in agreement as the trio tiptoed back into the hallway. Fox took one last look at Skye’s sleeping form before silently shutting the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for the delay in posting this. I've been having a really hard time sorting out Skye's character, and I apologize for any inconsistencies that might occur. She's been a much bigger challenge to write that I thought she would be...


	12. Journeys of the Mind and Soul

If Fox was being honest with herself, it was truly embarrassing to enjoy sunrises this much.

But there was nothing, absolutely nothing at all, like the silent moment of anticipation as the first rays emerged from beyond the horizon and bled across the navy sky. And then the breath would quicken in her chest, as the watercolor canvas far to the east shifted from burgundy to scarlet to a strikingly vivid orange that Fox saw nowhere else. When the first blinding sliver of sun finally edged its way over the tops of the trees, she could almost forget about everything else, if only for a minute.

For all she knew, mornings like this were unique to this planet - quietly and unassumingly majestic, like the soft breeze that nipped at her face and carried with it the indescribable scent of grassy fields misted with a fine layer of dew. They demanded no attention, but could command it effortlessly. 

Fox’s thoughts twisted back to mornings on Cordaie - she sure as hell wasn’t going to refer to it as her home planet, not even in her head - where the fat, orange sun would crawl upward through the haze and smog to banish the shadows where the scarce street lamps could not, as well as those who hid in their cover. It seemed like just yesterday that Fox was there, crouched in those puddles of darkness, waiting for the end of her shift, waiting for the sun.

Could it have really been three hundred years ago?

“You couldn’t stay asleep either, huh?”

Fox turned to find Anna, hands clasped tightly in front of her apron. In the faint light, Fox could see she was trembling, ever so slightly. Today was the day Fox would leave with Skye to take her to Tedeslar. She knew Anna had been worrying about it for days.

“I guess you could say that.”

Anna let out the tiniest sigh of understanding. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to go over the supplies we packed one last time.”

“Sure.” Fox brushed the dirt off her pants and followed the doctor back inside.

\-----

It was strange.

She didn’t remember walking, only running away. Life in the desert had taught her that nobody cared, that nobody had the time to care, not about a scrawny girl that dug the camp out of the rock with her bare hands. 

It was so strange. 

The dirt under her fingernails was forest dirt, rich in nutrients from dead flora and fauna that had decayed long ago. Stupid spoiled, pampered dirt. Life didn’t work like that. Nobody returned to the ground like that, gracefully, like the leaves falling that she never knew before, breathing their last breath into the depths as they simply slipped under. It was stupid, it was insane. It wasn’t real.

It was immensely strange, when they circled round her and cried their goodbyes, pressing small objects into her hands, placing them gently into her bag and lacing it up tight, tying it with a bow. She was being punished, wasn’t she? She still felt like she was being punished. She deserved to be punished. Didn’t she?

The whole week had been strange. It was already a blur. Somehow, it was hectic, while still being way too quiet. She would finish her chores quickly and play chess in her room, hoping nobody would bother her. It was mind-numbing, checkmating herself over and over again. After a while, she’d begun building towers out of the pieces. She’d found that if she sanded down the tops of the pawns on the floor, they’d stack better…

Then Fox was grabbing her hand, and she was being pulled away. She said something, maybe it was “wave goodnight,” or maybe “save goodbye.” Anna was crying, Sab was holding her shoulder. “Be safe, we love you.” 

They were lying, right? They had to be. “Be safe, we love you.” This was a punishment, a punishment for being too weak, for being a burden. She turned, and the rising sun blinded her for a moment. 

“Be safe.” They didn’t care about her safety. Nobody who cared about someone sent them away. She was weak, too weak, and they didn’t want to protect her. They were lying, right?

“Be safe!” They had said it was for her own good, so she could learn and grow. What a joke. Nobody did anything for anyone’s own good, did they? They were lying, they were lying, they had to be lying.

“We love you.”

\-----

The sun had just passed behind a cloud when Sab approached the western door, lugging a large piece of scrap metal behind him. He leaned it up against the wall, brushed off his hands, and pushed open the door.

Anna was at the stove, stirring a pot of soup. Behind her, on the table, four bowls rested, each paired with a spoon.

“Anna, you set two extra places.” 

She turned around, ladle in hand, to face Sab, who had just sat down at the table. Her face seemed to fall a bit as she glimpsed the two wooden bowls with matching carved spoons. 

“It’s fine, I can get it.” 

Anna nodded and turned back towards the soup, stirring absentmindedly as Sab replaced the bowls and spoons on the shelf. The dark circles under Anna’s eyes caught his attention, as did the way her fingers gripped the handle of the ladle, tight enough to where the knuckles were turning white.

Sab gently placed his hand on her shoulder. “I can stir it if you wa-”

“I’m fine,” Anna interjected. “Go sit down. It’s almost done anyways.” She seemed to flinch slightly, shaking him off. 

Sab backed away. “Anna, it’s okay to-”

“I said I’m fine!”

Sab froze for a second before slowly making his way back to the table and sitting down. He knew better than to try to make Anna talk anymore. It’d be better to wait for her to cool down.

He looked down at his hands. For the first time since he arrived, he noticed how calloused his skin had become. He’d always had rough skin on his hands, but now bits near his knuckles were peeling away, and the pads of his fingers had become thick. Bits of dirt stuck in the ridges that made up his fingerprint, even though he had washed his hands minutes ago.

He watched Anna, hunched over the soup, wordless. Her hands were calloused too, though her fingers were as thin as twigs compared to Sab’s. They trembled slightly as she carried the pot from the stove to the table and began doling out large spoonfuls of broth and rice into Sab’s bowl, and then her own. 

“I saw something today, when I was out gathering scrap metal,” he said between spoonfuls of broth. 

“Mhm?” Anna responded, at a volume that was barely audible.

“It was a bird’s nest, and inside there were two tiny eggs. Bright blue eggs, with little flecks of brown. They were beautiful, like little jewels. I can show you later, if you wish.”

Anna put down her spoon into her bowl, not bothering to look up. “Sounds like robins.”

“Robins?”

“Yeah.” She started stirring her soup, scooping up bits of rice before letting them drop back into the broth. “They’re from Earth.”

“Most animals and plants come from Earth, though, right?”

“Most originate from Earth, yeah. Robins were an accident, though.”

“What do you mean?”

Anna shifted in her seat. She swallowed a spoonful of soup before going back to stirring aimlessly. “I mean, it’s a legend mostly.” She slowly lowered the head of her spoon into the broth and watched it slowly fill up.

“You don’t have to tell it if you don’t want to.”

Anna shook her head. “It’s fine. It’s a short story.”

Sab nodded, waiting quietly as Anna took another bite.

“They weren’t on the original biotransports. According to the story, they somehow found their way onto cheap passenger transports and lived off of bugs that infested the ships. They were never supposed to be on those colony ships, and they were never supposed to end up on other planets. But nevertheless, here they are.”

She paused, taking the time to scrape stray grains of rice off the sides of her bowl. “The strange thing is, they’re wild robins too. Most other plant and animal life from Earth was carefully grown in labs and genetically edited before being sent offworld. The poor birds certainly had no idea what they were in for.”

Sab looked down at the table, not entirely sure what to say. When Anna didn’t say anything else for a few minutes, he picked up his spoon and bowl, put them in the washbasin, and left for the workroom, leaving Anna alone, still scraping the rice from her bowl, grain by grain.

\-----

“C’mon, ya need to eat something. We’ve been walking all day.” Fox held out a strip of jerky to Skye, who drew her knees to her chest and turned away.

Fox sighed. “I can hear your stomach from all the way over there. I know you’re hungry.”

Skye didn’t respond. 

Fox leaned up against the cave wall, stoking the fire with one hand and biting off a piece of jerky from the other. “Fine, have it your way,” she said through a mouthful of meat.

The girl continued to stare out the mouth of the cave that Fox had picked out for a temporary shelter. She realized then, watching the trees shiver in the darkness, that she wasn’t sure what she wanted. She didn’t want to go back to the little dwelling by the river, where she was small, and she didn’t want to go back to the desert, where she was even smaller. And she most certainly didn’t want to go forward, to Tedeslar, where nobody knew what she’d be.

The two had trekked through the woods from sunup to sundown. They were able to follow footpaths some of the time, but the vast majority of Skye’s day had been spent carefully avoiding gnarled tree roots, hopping over streams, and clambering over rocks. As the hours wore on, the land grew hillier and hillier, and the relatively flat path gave way to a steady uphill march. They were at the base of the mountains now, and Skye couldn’t help notice that the closer they got to Tedeslar, the more it felt like winter. Some of the trees were just beginning to put out buds, weeks behind those back at the base with Anna and Sab.

The stars twinkled from far beyond the trees. It was so dark, one could really only tell where the trees ended by finding where the stars began. If Skye looked close enough, she could find shapes in the stars, the same shapes she’d seen in the desert. A lizard, high above the trees, with its tail curved towards one of the planet’s smaller moons. A large red star that always reminded her of a little campfire, nestled at the base of a mountain, or what appeared to be a mountain anyways. A cactus, blooming upside-down, though for whatever reason it looked more like a sapling now. 

“Actually, if y’aren’t gonna eat…” Fox began, rifling through her pack from the sound of it, “I could show you something.”

Skye turned to see Fox offer her one of the stone blades, handle extended towards her. Wordlessly, she took it. Fox smiled a little.

“I dunno if they’ll let you use one in Tedeslar, but I figured you might as well be comfortable with one in your hand.” Fox left the cave for a few moments, and brought back two dead branches a little shorter than Skye was tall. She handed one to Skye. It was covered in scaly fungus and thick, ridged bark the color of wet river rocks.

Fox sat down in front of Skye, and started slowly scraping the bark off her branch. “Whenever you use a knife, make sure to point the blade away from you, so you don’t cut yourself.” Chips of wood and bark began to fall into Fox’s lap. “How about you try?”

Skye turned the knife over in her hands. It was so dull, it was hard to tell which side was the sharp edge. Naturally, Fox didn’t think Skye was ready for a real knife. She was too small for that, too weak.

For a few minutes, the cave was silent, save for the crackling of the fire behind them and the soft scraping of stone against wood. The top of Skye’s branch was chipped and marred, but as she got further and further down, the branch became smoother and less dented by her movements. As she was working her way around a small knot, a question came to her, and she didn’t have the time to push it back down before it popped out of her mouth.

“I thought you were going to teach me how to fight?” she asked, her voice low and gravelly.

“I was,” Fox replied, deftly working over her branch, trying to hide her surprise that Skye had actually spoken after being silent for so long. “But knives are tools before they’re weapons. ‘S important you learn to use them as tools first.”

Skye sighed. 

“I know. When I was your age I thought it was stupid too. But just trust me on this, kay?”

Skye didn’t say anything, and returned to peeling the rest of the bark off her branch. She finished a few minutes after Fox did, upon which the woman took it from her and began examining it from every angle. “Not bad, not bad,” she mused, a smile forming on her lips.

“You’ve got the makings of a fine walking stick there,” she commented, handing the branch back to Skye. “Makes me think… you’re ready for this…”

Fox walked around the campfire to Skye’s pack and started to rummage through it. Skye began to protest, to which Fox responded “Shh! Close your eyes!”

Skye complied reluctantly, though a little curious as to what Fox was doing. She hadn’t even bothered to look in her bag since the start of the trip, so she had no idea what Fox was fishing out of there. After a few seconds, she heard Fox’s soft “Aha! There it is!” and a few seconds later, something was placed into her hand, something small and lightweight, as Fox closed her fingers around it. 

“Alright, you can open ‘em now.”

She looked down, and for a second, she didn’t know what it was. Something oblong, encased in leather, with a handle. She pulled on the handle, and after a bit of struggle, it came free, revealing a blade that shimmered light blue in the firelight.

A knife. A real one.

“It was Sab’s idea. That’s real plassteel there, strongest stuff you’ll find anywhere. Now, you’re gonna have to tell Erika you have it when we get to Tedeslar, and she might not want you carrying it around…”

A real knife. Like…

“...and you can only use it as a tool, ya hear? I don’t wanna get some radio call saying you’ve hurt someone with that thing…”

Like an adult.

She walked closer to the campfire. The handle, made of some durable plastic, was sanded to a texture that wasn’t quite rough and wasn’t quite smooth, but somewhere in between. It had been scored, too, to keep in place the thick string that criss-crossed itself as it wound down to the base. Skye curled her fingers around the handle, and it fit in her hand perfectly. The blade had been polished to a shine. Holding it up to the light, she could make out a pair of dark brown eyes, staring back at her.

The leather casing, or the scabbard as Fox explained, was made of some sort of animal hide. Embroidered flower vines made of ebony black and mud brown thread snaked their way up from the tip of the scabbard and bloomed at the hilt of the blade. Two long strips of leather were stitched to the other side. 

“Anna and I gave you gifts too. I think she probably intended for you to open them when you got to Tedeslar, but… I think now was the right time to give you that.”

Skye looked up at Fox, who smiled back down at her. “If you go to sleep now, I’ll let ya wear it tomorrow. How ‘bout it?”

She made up her bedroll on the opposite side of the campfire from Fox, and laid the plassteel knife carefully on a rock next to her. Fox chuckled. “You don’t want to sleep that close to a weapon. Put it in your bag for now.”

Skye could have retorted that Fox never unholstered her pistol to sleep, but she didn’t. She couldn’t believe that they had actually given her a knife. She lay awake, long after Fox had started snoring, staring up at the dancing light the fire cast against the cave ceiling.

Having the knife didn’t change much of anything. It didn’t change the fact that she was leaving, and it didn’t change the fact that she still didn’t really know where she was supposed to be. But something had shifted, just a bit. Skye just couldn’t put it into words.

\-----

By the time Anna was done seeding the field with potatoes, her hands were positively filthy. She sat back on her heels in the soft dirt, the scent of freshly turned earth wafting off the rows that ran the length of the field.

Did she ever imagine that she would end up doing this? Crouching in a damp field under a distant star, scratching a meager existence out of the soil, with muddy knees? It was only about a year ago that she woke up here. How was it only now that she was beginning to question everything that had happened?

For a year now, Anna had divided her life into two neat compartments, the before and the after. Everything after the crash landing - Fox, Sab, building the house, sowing the fields, fighting off raiders, Skye, fixing up broken bodies with herbs and old rags again and again and again - was continually flowing through her mind, slightly turbulent but steady, like the river, continually reminding her of her current duties and aims. There was hardly time to reflect on it all but in sparse moments like this, little bits of time alone that could hardly be planned, much less savored.

And everything before, the twenty eight years of life that somehow ended with her stepping into that cryptosleep chamber, was kept locked away, like anything else with a dangerous potency. She took out tiny bits and pieces when she needed them most, making sure to carefully put them back when she was done, lest she imbibe too much and fall apart. How to do a proper suture, how to fry rice, how to braid a little girl’s hair… She couldn’t afford to take much more, to tug further at these strings of memory she so tentatively held. There were too many things to get done, and a limited amount of energy to do it with.

Anna shook her head violently, bidding the thoughts to cease, as she brushed off her hands and headed back towards the base to grab her axe before turning towards the forest at the edge of the fields. Picking a tree about twice as tall as her, she raised her axe and swung, striking the trunk near the base. The tree was thin enough that the leaves still shook, and a chorus of chirps echoed above Anna’s head. 

She looked up in surprise, ducking quickly as a robin darted out from a nest and flew off towards the fields. Watching it disappear around the edge of the trees, she realised suddenly that she had scared it away from its chicks. Anna dropped the axe into the dirt, trying to quell the guilt that was starting to rise in her chest. It was fine, it would come back soon, it had to…

Anna looked up at the nest. Sure enough, the chicks were crying away, nestled amidst a bed of dried grasses and bright blue shell fragments. Anna suppressed an urge to move closer, moving instead out to a grassy patch a few yards away and sitting down to make herself smaller, in hopes that the mother robin would come back. 

After a few minutes, just when the woman was starting to lose patience, the little brown bird with the bright orange belly flashed back into view, settling back into the nest to look over the tiny babies. It was hard to resist watching for a few more minutes, as the mother bird flew off and reappeared, bugs clutched in her beak. Anna wondered vaguely if these were the same birds that Sab found yesterday. She’d have to ask later, if she remembered to.

The mother bird was struggling with a particularly squirmy worm, and for a second Anna wondered if the bird knew it wasn’t on old Earth. Did birds pass stories down the way people did? Was there any way for them to know that they weren’t supposed to be here? 

“That’s stupid,” she half-said, half-whispered aloud. Of course the birds didn’t know. It had been thousands of years since they’d left, and who knew how long they’d been living here on this planet. They’d be here for the rest of their lives. It didn’t make a difference at all, did it?

Anna carefully retrieved her axe from the base of the tree and started looking for another one that was less inhabited. The thoughts kept tugging at her, beckoning her further down a path she knew she shouldn't follow. And it scared her because, well, she knew where they led.

Because she didn’t want to think about the fact that she wasn’t supposed to be here, that perhaps none of them were supposed to be here. The robins obviously didn’t care. Maybe she could do that too - just keep on working without asking why. She’d been doing it for a year, just taking what this planet gave her and scraping by. The whole colony had been doing the same thing with Skye, hadn't they? Just had taken her in without asking why.

Maybe it was pointless to ask why. It didn’t change anything, did it? It could only waste time, and open wounds that the year had managed to suture for her. And Anna knew better than to remove stitches when she knew the wound would bleed.

So she found a tree, and swung again, and let the axe bite into the wood. No birds protested as she did it again and again, until the tree had fallen and that familiar river of after-crash concerns flooded her mind once more.

\-----

“Ya know, Sab told me that the air might be thinner up here,” Fox exhaled, panting into the frigid air. In the early evening on the second day of their journey, the temperature had dropped enough to freeze her breath into soft wispy clouds.

Skye nodded, wrapping her jacket closer to her body. The hills had grown steeper and steeper as she and Fox followed the faint dirt track up towards Tedeslar. She’d never before seen cliffs dusted with snow instead of sand, or trees with needles instead of leaves, or grand cascades of water falling hundreds of feet into the river below. It was frightening and fascinating at the same time. 

“Thinner?” It was all Skye could say as she caught her breath.

“Like… harder to breathe I guess,” Fox replied. “We can rest for a bit, if ya want. We’re making good time.”

Skye nodded, collapsing onto a nearby rock. She reflexively checked the sheath at her side, making sure her new knife was still there. She let out a sigh of relief as her fingers grazed the top of the sanded handle.

“You’re gonna have to try to stop doing that, ya know,” Fox said as she pulled two strips of jerky out of her bag and handed one to Skye. “I know you’re afraid to lose it, but you don’t need people thinking you’re antsy to stab ‘em. Tends not to work out too well.”

Skye repressed the urge to touch the knife handle again, knowing that Fox had a point. The two sat there in silence for a while, Fox stretching out her legs, Skye scanning the horizon. Behind them, the cliffs and hills gave way to flat forests and stretches of fields. Ahead, the mountains rose ever higher, crested with fog and snow.

After about half an hour or so, Fox peeled herself from the log where she’d been laying and beckoned the girl onward. Their pace was slower, now that the path was steeper and the air was colder. It felt like hours before the path led them to a small wooden watchtower, populated by two sentries.

“Hello!” a cheerful voice called out as the Skye and Fox crested the hill. Before they could react, a tall, lanky boy with sandy hair jumped down the tower ladder and ran up to them, followed by a grey husky that stopped by its master’s heels and barked at the two travelers. Skye froze in her tracks as Fox hesitated, trying to gauge the situation.

The boy stopped a few feet from them, and now that Skye had a better view of him, she could tell that he was just a teenager, maybe fifteen or sixteen, and just an inch or two shorter than Fox. 

“Are you the ones from the new colony out in the lower forest? Wow, that’s pretty cool. Erika’s told us about your settlement - I haven’t been yet, but some of the others got to go during the winter. Is this your first time coming to Tedeslar? I hope you like-”

“Ronald!” a female voice shouted from the top of the watchtower. Ronald turned his head as a young woman with short black hair and a rifle at her side appeared at the upper railing. “Ask them to state their business,” she demanded, picking up her rifle but keeping its muzzle pointed at the ground.

“Relax, Akira, they don’t seem so dangerous-” He was cut off as Fox, with a sweep of her leg, knocked his feet out from under him and sent him sprawling to the ground. Akira swiftly brought her rifle to her shoulder and pointed the muzzle at Fox.

“Hey!” Ronald called out, still on the ground. “What was that for?”

Fox smirked. “Your partner is right. You should make sure we’re who we say we are before you get all buddy-buddy on us.”

“Okay fine, who are you and why are you here?”

“I’m Fox, and this here’s Skye. We’re bringing her to Tedeslar for school. But we could be lying. How do you prove we’re not?”

“State the password!” Akira shouted, not loosening her grip on the rifle.

“It’s ‘sherbet lemon,’” Fox said, smiling as she helped Ronald up off the ground. Akira lowered her gun and slowly descended the ladder, a confused expression on her face.

“If I may,” Akira began, stopping a few yards from the rest of the group, “what was all that about?”

“If you want to keep your town safe, you need to keep your guard up. They’re counting on you to be cautious.” 

Akira hesitated for a moment, and then nodded. “Well, I guess we need to lead you on to the town then… Erika mentioned that you might be coming around this time.”

“I can do it,” Ronald offered. He beckoned to his dog, and then to Fox and Skye. They followed him down another path that twisted through the trees and ran steeply downhill. Fox bantered with Ronald, and it seemed to Skye after a few minutes that he had completely forgotten about her just knocking him flat on his back. Skye kept her eyes on the dog. Once Ronald deemed them safe, the husky was relaxed, wagging his tail and leading the group down the hill at a casual pace. With the other two distracted, Skye reached out to touch it. His fur was soft and smooth, and gave her a small bit of comfort.

Eventually, the path leveled out, and the trees gave way to a large, flat clearing, and Skye’s breath was taken away. All around, the surrounding mountains rose into pointed peaks, forming a sort of eye-shaped hollow in the middle. Fields of various crops lay out across both sides of a wide river, and several people were squatting or kneeling in the dirt, planting seed. On the other side of the river, behind a small wooden bridge, thick stone walls rose out of the dirt, extending into the walls of both sides of the valley. The afternoon sun was setting just behind the mountains, forming a sort of crown atop the horizon, scattering beams across the entire valley.

“Well, here it is… Tedeslar!” Ron motioned towards the small gate in the wall, and Skye stopped. It all suddenly became very real - Tedeslar, going to school, living somewhere new, somewhere strange… For better or worse, she was here. 

She’d just have to wait and see.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I scrapped my writing for this chapter multiple times, but I think I finally like what I have here.
> 
> Also, I just noticed that I've been using the words "pistol" and "revolver" interchangeably. Fox has a revolver. I'll try to make sure I'm more clear in the future!

**Author's Note:**

> I hope y'all have enjoyed reading my work! If you have any constructive comments, I would love to hear them!


End file.
